Fedora 34 Aims To Shrink Its Install Media By Ramping Up Compression

While Fedora 33 hasn't even been released yet, Fedora 34 is already seeing new feature proposals.

One of the planned changes so far for next spring's Fedora 34 release is to reduce the installation media size by means of greater compression.

The current plan is to ramp up the compression ratio of the SquashFS file-system on the install media. Red Hat's Bohdan Khomutskyi is looking at making use of XZ compression, a block size of 1MiB, and without the BCJ filter. In doing so there should be roughly a 6.5% / 24 second longer install time but with space savings of roughly 142MiB for the Fedora install media. The install time should ultimately not regress much though due to a planned change to Fedora's Anaconda installer.

Shrinking the ISOs by 100+ MiB not only benefits those installing Fedora with less bandwidth consumption but this also helps reduce bandwidth/mirror requirements for the Fedora project.

The tentative Fedora 34 install media compression plans are laid out on this Wiki page.