Now That The Linux Kernel Can Be Zstd-Compressed, The Next Step Is The Firmware

With Linux 5.9 comes the ability to compress the Linux kernel image / initrd with Zstd for yielding faster boot speeds but at a compression ratio between Gzip and XZ/LZMA. Being proposed next with the widespread adoption of Facebook's Zstd is compressing the kernel microcode/firmware files.

A patch was sent out today to allow supporting Zstd-compressed firmware files by the Linux kernel. This in turn would basically allow the Zstandard compression algorithm to be used not only for kernel/initrd image compression but also for the many firmware files found on the system.

The proposed patch adds support so the kernel will properly deal with decompressing firmware files ending in ".zstd" prior to applying the firmware.

The patch is quite straight forward so hopefully we'll see this Zstd-compressed firmware support made available for Linux 5.10.

When pulling linux-firmware.git this morning, the raw tree came in at 593MB. For a rough gauge when XZ'ing an archive of the firmware tree it dropped to 125MB or 204MB for Zstd when using the default compression level while Zstd easily wins for decompression speed.