[Bug 1808056] Re: vmlinuz is very large in arm64 -raspi2

[Łukasz Zemczak]

Paolo - so last time we talked about this, you mentioned that the arm64
kernel doesn't support decompressing the kernel on boot like the armhf
one. Is that still the case? Since I have marked the linux-raspi2 task
as 'Won't Fix' because of this. If yes, is there any way of having the
same functionality of uncompressing the kernel on boot for arm64 as we
have for armhf?

I mean, I guess we could still switch compression on and try to gunzip
the kernel in u-boot, sure. But I'm worried that without a built-in
decompression mechanism we might be breaking some user edge-cases.

I left the linux-raspi2 task as Won't Fix also because I originally
thought that we'd be doing the compression of the kernels manually on
boot-partition content upgrades. But maybe this way is better indeed. Of
course it would be best if we just had the same situation here as with
armhf...

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Title:
  vmlinuz is very large in arm64 -raspi2

Status in flash-kernel package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in linux-raspi2 package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  The debs are close to the same size:

  mwhudson at ringil:~/Downloads$ ls -l linux-image-4.15.0-1030-raspi2_4.15.0-1030.32_arm64.deb 
  -rw-rw-r-- 1 mwhudson mwhudson 5398652 Dec 12 10:42 linux-image-4.15.0-1030-raspi2_4.15.0-1030.32_arm64.deb
  mwhudson at ringil:~/Downloads$ ls -l linux-image-4.15.0-1030-raspi2_4.15.0-1030.32_armhf.deb 
  -rw-rw-r-- 1 mwhudson mwhudson 6640960 Dec 12 10:42 linux-image-4.15.0-1030-raspi2_4.15.0-1030.32_armhf.deb

  But the vmlinuz on arm64 is several times larger:

  $ dpkg-deb -c linux-image-4.15.0-1030-raspi2_4.15.0-1030.32_armhf.deb 
  -rw------- root/root   6633048 2018-12-07 06:38 ./boot/vmlinuz-4.15.0-1030-raspi2
  $ dpkg-deb -c linux-image-4.15.0-1030-raspi2_4.15.0-1030.32_arm64.deb 
  -rw------- root/root  23914504 2018-12-07 06:38 ./boot/vmlinuz-4.15.0-1030-raspi2

  This forced us to make the boot partition larger for the raspi3 b+
  arm64 image we made.

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