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**sinepgib** · 12 March 2022, 11:48 AM

Originally posted by skeevy420 View Post

I was surprised at those results. While not much different, I expected lz4 to be one of the better performers.

AFAIR lz4 is optimized for compression speed, not size or decompression speed. Size may not seem at all relevant, but it does mean you have a smaller input to your decompressor and less data to read from disk.
I'm certainly surprised cat beat any of the compressed versions, precisely for the data size argument.

I never had a kernel+initramfs take that long on non-behemoth initramfs, even on rotating disks. My netbook currently does the kernel stage in about 1.5". Are you telling mkinitcpio to only pick modules you use and all that? How big is the initramfs?

**skeevy420** · 12 March 2022, 12:26 PM

Originally posted by sinepgib View Post

AFAIR lz4 is optimized for compression speed, not size or decompression speed. Size may not seem at all relevant, but it does mean you have a smaller input to your decompressor and less data to read from disk.
I'm certainly surprised cat beat any of the compressed versions, precisely for the data size argument.

I never had a kernel+initramfs take that long on non-behemoth initramfs, even on rotating disks. My netbook currently does the kernel stage in about 1.5". Are you telling mkinitcpio to only pick modules you use and all that? How big is the initramfs?

AFAIK LZ4 is used when you want speed for both. LZ4HC is where you sacrifice compression speed for more data compression, but both have high speed decompression (which Zstd inherited since it's based on LZ4 and by the same author).

LZ4 is the goto codec on ZFS when you want compression but don't want to be bottle-necked during codec operations. You usually need very high speed disks (expensive NVMe) to outperform LZ4 in compression or decompression.

My kernels are between 9-10MB and the initramfs between 21-22MB (Dolphin) and they only contain a minimal amount of modules. That's the uncompressed size. Give me a while and I'll get around to compressing them and see what I get.

**sinepgib** · 12 March 2022, 01:06 PM

Originally posted by skeevy420 View Post

LZ4 is the goto codec on ZFS when you want compression but don't want to be bottle-necked during codec operations. You usually need very high speed disks (expensive NVMe) to outperform LZ4 in compression or decompression.

I'd need to check because my memory is not as good as it used to, I know I'm using either lz4 or zstd in my old Atom laptop (with a regular SSD to saturate its SATA bus), I tried and timed all of the codecs recent kernels support and picked the fastest one. I think it was zstd, but you may be right. Of course, this is an anecdotal note only.

Originally posted by skeevy420 View Post

My kernels are between 9-10MB and the initramfs between 21-22MB (Dolphin) and they only contain a minimal amount of modules. That's the uncompressed size. Give me a while and I'll get around to compressing them and see what I get.

Mine are both kernel and initramfs about 7MiB, but the one computer I paid the most attention to wrt boot is the netbook and that's 32 bits, so maybe the smaller kernel is due to that. The initramfs I doubt, being about a third the size is not likely based on that alone. If you remind me tomorrow I can share the exact numbers and my config if you want.

I can't right now because I'm using my employer's Mac to post this.

**Ranguvar** · 12 March 2022, 03:51 PM

Still no Intel 802.11n support, let alone AC or AX.

Rough.

At least N on OpenBSD gets things by for now.

**hotaru** · 12 March 2022, 09:32 PM

Originally posted by Ranguvar View Post

Still no Intel 802.11n support,

???

WiFi/80211n - FreeBSD Wiki

https://wiki.freebsd.org/WiFi/80211n

Some of the wireless drivers support 802.11n. The following is an incomplete list.

iwn (Intel) NICs - 4965, perhaps others; STA mode only
ath 11n series NICs (AR5416, AR9130, AR9160, AR9280, AR9285, AR9287, AR94xx, AR95xx) - STA/AP mode, TX and RX aggregation
mwl NICs (88W8363 802.11n NIC)
rsu (RTL8188SU / RTL81892SU)
urtwn (RTL8188CU / RTL8188RU / RTL8188EU / RTL8192CU)