Is it possible to increase the size of OpenBSD's bsd.rd without building it from source?
Having a bsd.rd extracted from an installation image and mounted as a vnode I can see there is 0.2MB free space available for additional files such as used during unattended installation.
I want to copy a file 1MB in size but it obviously won’t fit.
Having that said, is there any way to increase the size of the ramdisk kernel without building it from source?
My idea was to copy its content to newcontent.d, move my additional file into it, run makefs newcontent.fs newcontent.d on it, then rdsetroot bsd.rd.uc newcontent.fs and finally compress it and put back on an installation media.
Sadly, while the size of original bsd.rd is 3.3MB the copy of it takes 180MB…
I measure the size of directories using du -hs /path/to/directory.
Someone came up with a similar question some time ago on the misc@openbsd.org mailing list. Quoting directly Stuart Henderson’s answer:
Hello, I want to build "bigger" bsd.rd image. Does rebuilding it only way
to increase it? Can I somehow increase its size and just rdsetroot new
disk.fs?You’ll need to build a release(8) after adjusting at least FSSIZE in the
relevant Makefiles under src/distrib, maybe also MINIROOTSIZE in kernel
config.
So, apparently not, you can’t do it without rebuilding the kernel.