Rebuilded kernel packages get really large

English Open Build Service (OBS)
1

Hi,

I’ve been following the practice of “backporting” newer kernels to my openSUSE installations. "rpmbuild --rebuild"ing the http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Kernel:/HEAD/openSUSE_Factory/nosrc/kernel-pae-2.6.30-44.1.nosrc.rpm kernel under openSUSE 11.0 and 11.1 I observe that the kernel-pae RPMs get really large, >100MB, compared to the approx. 17MB I know from older kernels. The RPM compiled for Factory http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Kernel:/HEAD/openSUSE_Factory/i586/kernel-pae-2.6.30-44.1.i586.rpm is only 14MB. What’s the reason for that? I already tried updating the rpm package to Factory’s version 4.4.2.3, but that didn’t help either.

best regards
Henning

2

Because normally original kernel from openSUSE is divided on kernel, kernel-base and kernel-extra. Look at the size of some kernels in the HEAD repo, they are not divided there and their size is also great :slight_smile:

3

I’m afraid that’s not the reason. Even the -base packages differ in size by a factor of 5:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Kernel:/HEAD/openSUSE_Factory/i586/:

kernel-pae-2.6.30-45.1.i586.rpm: 14M
kernel-pae-base-2.6.30-45.1.i586.rpm: 10M
kernel-pae-debuginfo-2.6.30-45.1.i586.rpm: 269M
kernel-pae-debugsource-2.6.30-45.1.i586.rpm: 41M
kernel-pae-devel-2.6.30-45.1.i586.rpm: 1.6M
kernel-pae-extra-2.6.30-45.1.i586.rpm: 7.8M

paul@vmmoskau111:~> ls -lh /usr/src/packages/RPMS/i586/kernel*
-rw-r–r-- 1 paul users 113M 2009-06-24 18:27 /usr/src/packages/RPMS/i586/kernel-pae-2.6.30-44.1.i586.rpm
-rw-r–r-- 1 paul users 53M 2009-06-24 18:28 /usr/src/packages/RPMS/i586/kernel-pae-base-2.6.30-44.1.i586.rpm
-rw-r–r-- 1 paul users 1.6M 2009-06-24 18:30 /usr/src/packages/RPMS/i586/kernel-pae-devel-2.6.30-44.1.i586.rpm
-rw-r–r-- 1 paul users 65M 2009-06-24 18:30 /usr/src/packages/RPMS/i586/kernel-pae-extra-2.6.30-44.1.i586.rpm

To me it looks as if the “strip --strip-unneeded” wasn’t performed on the kernel modules, maybe OBS uses a different set of RPM macros, since I cannot find any hints on this issue in the kernel-pae.spec file.

best regards
Henning