Set MODULES=dep by default in new installations?

[Aaron Rainbolt]

Multiple users have recently been reporting strange "out of memory" errors during early boot. Most notably, the Kubuntu Focus NX system seems to be unable to boot when the proprietary NVIDIA drivers are installed for an external NVIDIA GPU. These errors seem to be the result of an overloaded initramfs file. I currently don't know why overly large initramfs files cause an out-of-memory error, but they do.

In all cases I have seen, the problem was resolved by editing /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf, changing the line "MODULES=most" to "MODULES=dep", then regenerating the system's initramfs files. This results in no more out-of-memory errors, and in at least one case, it may have contributed to faster bootup speeds. I have not yet encountered a system that doesn't work when this setting is changed.

It might be too late in the Lunar cycle to experiment with this, but in my opinion, it might be a good idea to eventually start testing the effects of this setting on many systems by enabling it by default in new daily images and seeing what happens on our testers' systems. This may enable Ubuntu to work on more hardware, and increase boot speeds, which I think are both good things.

Obviously, this comes with the risk of causing some systems to become unbootable, as the failure to include the correct modules could cause problems. Since we are close to the Feature Freeze for Lunar, I think we should probably not try it this cycle, as I would expect it to take more than three months to properly test. But perhaps for 23.10, we can enable this close to the beginning of the cycle and see what happens?

EDIT: The Kubuntu Focus team has already set the MODULES=dep option for the Kubuntu Focus NX systems by default, and also changed the compression algorithm used by default. The system's boot speeds increased, and there were no more out-of-memory errors after installing the NVIDIA drivers.

[Aaron Rainbolt (arraybolt3)]

Nevermind, I missed that there was an ongoing effort to fix the out of memory bug. And the thing I'm proposing here wouldn't even work. Marking this as invalid and a duplicate, sorry about that.