[Bug 697569] Re: update-initramfs script stalls frequently on LiveUSB

[Stéphane Graber]

I did a few improvements to reduce the number of calls to update-
initramfs, however when it's actually called, it'll take up to 5 minutes
on a recent i7 quadcore machine, so I can totally believe that a slow
atom machine can take close to half an hour, it's sadly not something we
can fix in casper as it's really down to the CPU's ability to do
efficient lzma compression.

** Changed in: casper (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => Fix Released

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/697569

Title:
  update-initramfs script stalls frequently on LiveUSB

Status in “casper” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: initramfs-tools

  When running the script, say, to update the kernel, the script can
  take hours without advancing. Checking with htop, lzma is taking lots
  of memory (I have to add a swapfile in order to avoid the system to
  run out of it, using short of 500 MB of RAM), but its CPU use is
  practically none. The swapfile isn't used in full, either.

  When doing the upgrades, I procure to avoid doing anything else on the
  system, expecting the task to go unburdened. Still, I've had to wait
  over three hours to get no progress at all: the file
  /cdrom/casper/initrd.lz.new doesn't change at all when checking from
  time to time with ls.

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
  Package: initramfs-tools 0.98.1ubuntu6 [modified: usr/sbin/update-initramfs]
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-24.42-generic 2.6.35.8
  Uname: Linux 2.6.35-24-generic i686
  Architecture: i386
  Date: Wed Jan  5 04:09:13 2011
  LiveMediaBuild: Lubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - i386 (20101010)
  PackageArchitecture: all
  ProcEnviron:
   LANGUAGE=es_CO.UTF-8
   LANG=es_CO.UTF-8
   LC_MESSAGES=es_CO.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  SourcePackage: initramfs-tools

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