A question to garuda developers

Hello! I was interested in the workings of mhwd and coming from a little Google search there isn't much documentation about it. As garuda successfully integrated mhwd into its isos, How did you guys store all the drivers because the drivers in packages mhwd of your iso profile they are in excess of 400mb . So do you guys actually ship 400 mb of drivers with the iso?

I heard they use Squish & Squash, my inquisitive friend. :wink:

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How else do you think a single iso can boot on multiple devices with different hardware

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God damn. Respect 400mb of drivers.

Haven't paid any attention to what Garuda uses, but many distributions use this.

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Not sure tbh, but I guess squashfs is a filesystem for storing system files in live boot medium. Whereas MHWD is kind of script.

Open for discussion.

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Garuda does use squashfs in building the iso. Within the iso there is a separate mhwd file system. Sure it takes some space :man_shrugging:

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SquashFS filesystems read the OS image into and out of memory on LiveISOs. It's so that distribution developers can compress an almost entire operating system whose installed size is what, 5 gigs or so, into a read-only format that fits into a mimimal-sized ISO.

Remember, the minimum amount of installed and available memory a user might have also is involved in addressing image sizes. We talk about this all the time here.

Think about it. Every installed Linux OS reads parts of itself into and out of RAM constantly. SquashFS and its ilk do the same with LiveISOs.

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How would you "split" the packages. As thr packages must be on the same filesystem, no? What I mean is how would you install x packages on a different fs? As the normal iso is zstd compressed and wgat I understand is you install thr packages on diff compressed thing?

A filesystem is a filesystem. They don't necessarily "care" what you put on them; they just seem to go-with-the-flow. What interprets the FS is an entirely different matter.

I may have read somewhere that what, Win 11 can or will read (how about write) BTRFS? All it takes is just another driver from Paragon, I guess.
:wink:

But won't packages install to the main fs automatically?

I think i understand a little bit, You compress the directory of the packages and then add it to fstab to mount it on boot. But where are the packages installed? THe ones i found on google show the downloaded ones

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