Zstd-Compressing The Linux Kernel Has Been Brought Up Again

[andreano]

Zstd seems to be the new hotness, but is it “suitable for long term archiving” (unlike Xz)?

[andreano]

If shaving off 1s of boot time is relevant for you, then …

Need motivation? Steve Jobs (an expert motivator) used the analogy of saving lives.

[fuzz]

I was thinking zstd would be great for compressed zswap too.

[Raka555]

FYI, I posted my own gzip vs xz vs zstd and other benchmarks at https://community.centminmod.com/thr...-xz-etc.17259/ - zstd has so many options beyond default which can tune it for either high compression ratios or compression/decompression speed

Wow, very nicely done!
It is exactly the graph I wanted to see. Glad you didn't use log scale for x-axis.
Pitty lz4 was'nt in your test.
I am very surprised at how well pigz did at high speed compression.
Would have been awesome if you had the same graph for decompression speed vs compression ratio. (Edit: Its hard to get a good picture from the data alone)

[phuclv]

If shaving off 1s of boot time is relevant for you, then you clearly have a severe stability issue with your operating system.

It is really relevant in a lot of cases. Modern laptops can boot up in 5-10s which means a 1s reduction is a massive improvement
One of my previous employers have already switched to lz4 for faster boot up several years ago on ARM devices because it relates to user safety and user satisfaction

[eva2000]

Michael: How about some zstd/lz4/xz/etc ... graphs.

Compression/Decompression speed vs ratio or size (at all their supported compression levels) would be awesome

FYI, I posted my own gzip vs xz vs zstd and other benchmarks at https://community.centminmod.com/thr...-xz-etc.17259/ - zstd has so many options beyond default which can tune it for either high compression ratios or compression/decompression speed

[Zan Lynx]

If shaving off 1s of boot time is relevant for you, then you clearly have a severe stability issue with your operating system.

Windows systems can boot from hibernate in about 3 seconds. Why should Linux take longer?

[LoveRPi]

Ubuntu got it right with lz4. Adding support for Zstd isn't a problem. Going forward, IO will continue to scale faster than CPU which is already the case.

[dwagner]

If shaving off 1s of boot time is relevant for you, then you clearly have a severe stability issue with your operating system.

BTW: (De-)compression algorithms need very thorough testing against security vulnerabilities. If you put such an algorithm into the kernel, make very, very sure that you have tested it with all kinds of random and maliciously crafted input.

[Raka555]

Michael: How about some zstd/lz4/xz/etc ... graphs.

Compression/Decompression speed vs ratio or size (at all their supported compression levels) would be awesome