snapd

  1. Bug #1867415
  2. Comment #0

Comment 0 for bug 1867415

Revision history for this message
Alkis Georgopoulos (alkisg) wrote : /var/lib/snapd/snaps needs 400 MB tmpfs RAM on live CDs

Boot with e.g. the current ubuntu-20.04-desktop-amd64.iso. Open a terminal and run `df -h`. You'll notice:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/cow 2.0G 434M 1.5G 23% /

This means that the tmpfs file system needs 400 MB RAM for snaps. Xenial didn't have snaps and needed only 14 MB tmpfs. Snap shouldn't consume tmpfs RAM space, it should only use squashfs disk space.

For example, if in the next Ubuntu version more apps become snaps, it will need more RAM than the system will have, and this will make live CDs unbootable.

That RAM is wasted because somehow /var/lib/snapd/snaps is copied-up in overlayfs and uses tmpfs/RAM space instead of being provided from the squashfs image.