Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2020 22:04:39 +0000 From: Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com> To: Riccardo Lombardi <ric.lombardi@gmail.com>, freebsd-cloud@freebsd.org Subject: Re: EC2 AMI size of Freebsd 12 (and maybe a feature request) Message-ID: <010001748ea604b7-67a61380-0272-4a14-94e3-e2d80f02c763-000000@email.amazonses.com> In-Reply-To: <CAAr7tvFrBuNWK2t2c1z3EGuU%2BhvhUjZ-s5FwkeAa3XvEj5QFTw@mail.gmail.com> References: <CAAr7tvFrBuNWK2t2c1z3EGuU%2BhvhUjZ-s5FwkeAa3XvEj5QFTw@mail.gmail.com>
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On 2020-09-14 08:35, Riccardo Lombardi wrote: > First of all, thank you for all your efforts for making FreeBSD usable in > EC2 environments, and sorry for my english. Your English seems fine to me! > I'm mainly a hobby web developer, with limited (end-user) experience in > Unix systems. > I recently switched to FreeBSD for my web server and noticed that the > "out-of-the-box" FreeBSD 12 AMI in AWS uses a lot of disk space (3.8Gb > using the df -h command) in comparison with other Linux distributions, > which usually start with 1-1.5Gb disk space. > I also wanted to point out that the size of the FreeBSD 11 AMI is strangely > quite smaller (2.4G). > The largest directories I could find in FreeBSD 12 are: > /usr/lib/debug: 1.5G > /var/db/freebsd-update: 508M You're seeing two things here: 1. FreeBSD 12 has far more space used for debug symbols than FreeBSD 11 (and FreeBSD 13 has even more -- over 2 GB). 2. When you launched FreeBSD 12 it downloaded updates -- including kernel updates and the associated updated debug symbols. Assuming the FreeBSD 11 you launched was 11.4, it didn't have nearly as many updates to download. > My aim (and I suppose this could be useful for many developers and EC2 > users) was originally to shrink the AMI size by eliminating things that are > not necessary in a production environment (maybe the kernel-debug tools). > Unfortunately I don't think i have enough knowledge to make my own custom > light AMI. > > So, if this could be useful for the community, and I think so, it would be > very nice to see some of the following things / features: > - First of all check it there's some problem with the disk size of the > FreeBSD 12 (compared with the 11, maybe there are old unused libraries from > the update), and eventually publish a new, "clean", AMI > - OR/AND maybe implement a "lightweight" version of the FreeBSD AMI, > without some non essential components. I'm seriously considering providing "minimal" AMIs without debug symbols (and maybe other stuff; I'm not sure if there's anything else worth excluding). Right now this and other "flavoured FreeBSDs" is blocked by Amazon not enabling the SSM Parameter Store for FreeBSD to register AMIs. > - Reduce the minimum EBS volume size from the current 10G to 8 or maybe 5 > (accordingly with the final size of the new AMI) That is already done -- while we have 10 GB as the *default* size, you can launch FreeBSD instances with any size as long as it's large enough for the disk image (between 3-5 GB depending on version). ... with the exception of the AWS Marketplace, because they couldn't figure out how to copy our disk snapshots properly, that is. Nothing I can do to fix them. :-/ -- Colin Percival Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid
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