Fedora 34 Change To Further Compress Install Media Rejected Due To Install Time Concerns

The plans to shrink the Fedora install media by ramping up the compression settings were rejected at last week's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee meeting.

The plan had called for ramping up the XZ compression settings for Fedora's SquashFS image in order to deliver a smaller image. Some numbers being talked about in the proposal were saving around 142MiB for a roughly 6.5% longer install time.

While the smaller image size is a win for those on limited/metered bandwidth as well as reducing the hosting requirements for Fedora mirrors, depending upon your system the increase in install time could be much longer.

FESCo members ultimately decided to abandon the change proposal as currently laid out for Fedora 34. With greater XZ compression settings causing longer install times, they are not in favor of it. But not all is lost as ultimately they will likely switch to using Zstd compression that in turn can offer more compact images but with faster decompression. But whether the Zstd compressed images will materialize for Fedora 34 or be held off for a later release cycle remains to be determined.

The latest FESCo meeting minutes can be found via meetbot.fedoraproject.org.