Canonical's Snap Packaging Switching To LZO Compression For Faster Startup Times

[jo-erlend]

Thank you!

My pleasure. Literally. It's so nice when people just ask real questions.

[geearf]

Snap was made in part in order to provide a universal packaging system for systems including Ubuntu touch, which used the Android kernel. If they had known in advance that they wouldn't finish Ubuntu Personal, then it's possible that they would've made it differently.

I think Android has been a greater limitation than Debian or CentOS, but I'm sure they consider them important.

Thank you!

[zzarko]

On my Ubuntu 18.04 system on SSD, GIMP with all its plugins loading starts in under 5 seconds, while Gnome Calculator (from Snap) needs more than 10. And that is every time I need it, more than 10 seconds for it to show its window. I uninstalled it and installed MATE version, that starts instantly.

[jo-erlend]

For Ubuntu and other distros, wouldn't a 3.19 be old enough anyway or do they have to support really old kernels for like CentOS/Debian/etc ?
As for Android that I did not know. How common is it to use Snap there?

Snap was made in part in order to provide a universal packaging system for systems including Ubuntu touch, which used the Android kernel. If they had known in advance that they wouldn't finish Ubuntu Personal, then it's possible that they would've made it differently.

I think Android has been a greater limitation than Debian or CentOS, but I'm sure they consider them important.

[geearf]

"The kernel"? It's important to remember that Snap was designed to be used on Android kernels as well as Ubuntu kernels and other mainstream distros.

For Ubuntu and other distros, wouldn't a 3.19 be old enough anyway or do they have to support really old kernels for like CentOS/Debian/etc ?
As for Android that I did not know. How common is it to use Snap there?

[ssokolow]

6 seconds to start

And people can configure Ubuntu to boot in less than that. :P </troll>

[andre30correia]

Snap is so awfully slow!
Chromium takes forever to start on Ubuntu!
I think Ubuntu boots faster than it takes Chromium to start!

6 seconds to start

[carewolf]

So this seems to be a good answer.

As in less than 5 years old.. So not among the supported versions.

[CochainComplex]

I guess I mainly agree with you in this case, but in the OP's defense (and acknowledging that he was probably too quick on the draw here), maybe like many of us he's just fed up with the ubiquitous bitching about tech decisions just because Someone's Pet Thing didn't get selected. It's all the time why Qt, why not GTK? Why snap, why not flatpak? Why Linux, why not ***BSD? Not to mention the special category of whiners who always obsess about hobby projects, the more obscure the better it seems. Why GNOME, why not dwm? Why systemd, why not s6? Why Rust, why not Jai? Etc. Bottom line, people should either get a life, or get involved in the project they complain about.

I agree if it is just whining. But lzo at least in the initramfs and swap cases can be drop-in replaced by lz4 without any drawback for modern systems (not sure about arm). The purpose here is similar: speeding up / lower startuptime whilst still being compressed. It is a rather obvious choice to use lz4 whenever lzo is mentioned.
Transfering this idea to snaps is not a OT whining or whataboutism...like "i prefer Wayland why nobody uses it etc? Oh my gosh systemd is supressing us".

So having a technical discussion about the purpose is what makes this forum interesting for me. I'm learning a lot even if I disagree occessionally in such discussions.

[CochainComplex]

About the used compression wikipedia says about Squashfs, which is used inside snaps:



So, using lz4 or zstd would have needed a newer kernel.

So this seems to be a good answer.