Tiny Core Linux

Tiny Core Base => TCB Bugs => Topic started by: CardealRusso on September 18, 2023, 05:46:30 AM

Title: Mount extracted extensions
Post by: CardealRusso on September 18, 2023, 05:46:30 AM
Sorry, this is not a bug but a suggestion, but I didn't find a more suitable session.

TinyCore can become inefficient with memory usage when mounting multiple extensions, I believe this could be minimized if it allowed the user to load an extension, for example "firefox.tcz" (that's a folder) in optional.

It is also not very hard to make this change in tce-load for those who have good experience with shell.
Title: Re: Mount extracted extensions
Post by: polikuo on September 18, 2023, 06:37:16 AM
Hi, CardealRusso.
You can adjust your onboot.lst so only the minimal desktop is loaded with every boot.
Then put your firefox to ondemend for quick access.
Code: [Select]
$ vi /etc/sysconfig/tcedir/onboot.lst
$ ondemand firefox.tcz
Title: Re: Mount extracted extensions
Post by: CardealRusso on September 18, 2023, 07:21:05 AM
You can adjust your onboot.lst so only the minimal desktop is loaded with every boot.

Hello, polikuo.

I think my message lacked a little detail. Your suggestion still goes through the problem I mentioned because the problem is setting up a squashfs tcz, it consumes a small amount of ram which is quite significant when you have multiple extensions (by extensions, I'm not referring to "app.tcz", but yes to "app.tcz" and all its dependencies, such as "lib1.tcz", "lib2.tcz" etc...)

With just a single application.tcz with different compression algorithms, without changing its dependencies, a sudden change in RAM memory usage was noticeable, something I mentioned in a previous post.

CompSizeRamDecomp (Real)
zstd(128k)119MB391MB0.37s
lz4(128k)181MB381MB0.35s
gzip(128k)131MB379MB0.32s
zstd(4k)154MB385MB1.12s
gzip(4k)160MB374MB1.15s

I'm not suggesting any sudden changes to Base, just being able to load an extension from a .tcz folder. I know that it is possible to create tcz with other types of containers besides squashfs and perhaps these would be able to be mounted, in my specific case an extracted folder is very advantageous because with btrfs I can specify the compression level of the files.
Title: Re: Mount extracted extensions
Post by: curaga on September 18, 2023, 09:35:59 AM
You could bind-mount the dir at some suitable point? Or certainly hack tce-load for yourself. However it wouldn't fit in TC in my opinion, it goes against the philosophy. An extracted tree is mutable, corruptible. It would be close to a traditional distro install then - at which point, why use TC?