Compress the lima-guestagent in the installation directory

[afbjorklund]

Description

There are a lot of architectures, and not all of them are used...

We could compress them in the install, and decompress on host.

The on-disk lima installation goes from 175M to 68M, with gzip.

Note: lima-guestagent is still uncompressed, in the cidata.iso

[afbjorklund]

Could make some different comparisons (size and time), using different compression formats and levels.

[jandubois]

Is this really worth the effort? Given that most Linux images are in the 300MB range?

I could see adding additional Makefile targets to only build the "native" guestagent that matches the host arch by default (if we don't already have that), but the additional compression/decompression seems like a micro-optimization by now (I might have felt differently about this even just 5 years ago).

[afbjorklund]

The installation was indeed smaller, but it is probably not worth the complication.

38M	_output/share/lima/lima-guestagent.Linux-aarch64
37M	_output/share/lima/lima-guestagent.Linux-armv7l
38M	_output/share/lima/lima-guestagent.Linux-riscv64
39M	_output/share/lima/lima-guestagent.Linux-x86_64

11M	_output/share/lima/lima-guestagent.Linux-aarch64.gz
11M	_output/share/lima/lima-guestagent.Linux-armv7l.gz
11M	_output/share/lima/lima-guestagent.Linux-riscv64.gz
12M	_output/share/lima/lima-guestagent.Linux-x86_64.gz

7,6M	_output/share/lima/lima-guestagent.Linux-aarch64.zst
7,6M	_output/share/lima/lima-guestagent.Linux-armv7l.zst
8,2M	_output/share/lima/lima-guestagent.Linux-riscv64.zst
8,6M	_output/share/lima/lima-guestagent.Linux-x86_64.zst

If anything, could make it a boolean and stick with gzip only (smaller code addition)?

-const Ext = ""
+const Ext = ".gz"
 
 func Open(path string) (io.ReadCloser, error) {
-	return os.Open(path)
+	reader, err := os.Open(path + Ext)
+	if err != nil {
+		return nil, err
+	}
+	return gzip.NewReader(reader)
 }

[afbjorklund]

I could see adding additional Makefile targets to only build the "native" guestagent that matches the host arch by default (if we don't already have that)

The "minimal" target does just this.

        _output/share/lima/lima-guestagent.Linux-$(shell uname -m | sed -e s/arm64/aarch64/)

[jandubois]

The "minimal" target does just this.

What I have wanted in the past is something like make minimal templates install, so I still get all the templates, but only the native guestagent. Because minimal only installs the default template.

Obviously this is simple enough to add if/when I really need it.

[afbjorklund]

Added a defconfig target to generate the arch config: #2446

make defconfig all install

Not sure if it is best with a script, or just two defconfig files ?

CONFIG_GUESTAGENT_OS_LINUX=y
CONFIG_GUESTAGENT_OS_FREEBSD=n
CONFIG_GUESTAGENT_ARCH_X8664=y
CONFIG_GUESTAGENT_ARCH_AARCH64=y
CONFIG_GUESTAGENT_ARCH_ARMV7L=y
CONFIG_GUESTAGENT_ARCH_RISCV64=y

[afbjorklund]

"all" + gzip: (4 targets)

69M _output/

"minimal": (1 target)

64M _output/