Dealing with the large size of the repository

[Ivan-Velickovic]

As we add more platforms and examples to the VMM repository, naturally the size of it will grow as we are storing Linux kernel images and root file systems. Currently it sits at ~500MB which can definitely be reduced with a variety of ways. However, even with reducing the sizes it will always be in the order of megabytes, which is far too large for something that is ultimately a library that you use within another project.

At the same time, we cannot expect everyone who wants to get started and actually run the VMM examples to build the Linux kernel and root file system themselves (even though we include the config files for reproducibility). So as a long-term solution I see two options, either we have some server that contains the binaries that people wget from or have the build system grab them automatically. Or we have a submodule that contains the artifacts and so if people want to use the examples they do git clone --recursive, for those that only want to use the library they do git clone. Not quite happy with either solution, open to suggestions.

At the time of writing the codebase is still changing a lot and so this issue won't be dealt with for a while.

[wom-bat]

I'm really hoping we can use distro-packaged images at some point, when the virtIO system is mature. Then only a few 'special' images will have to be packaged here.

[wom-bat]

I now have code to grab an image and extract kernel and initrd from it. Still working on how to integrate that.

[Ivan-Velickovic]

I have been working in this https://github.com/au-ts/libvmm/tree/slim branch and made some progress.

What kind of images are you extracting from?