Patches Revived For A Zstd-Compressed Linux Kernel While Dropping LZMA & BZIP2

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 9 November 2018 at 09:02 PM EST. 27 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
For more than a year it's been talked about adding an option to support Zstd-compressed Linux kernel images while it looks like that Facebook-backed high performance compression algorithm for kernel images could soon finally be mainlined.

Zstd compression is used elsewhere in the Linux kernel but support for compressing the kernel image with Zstandard hasn't materialized in the tree. On Friday, developer Adam Borowski sent out a set of 17 patches adding kernel compression for Zstd. In the process, he's also aiming to drop LZMA1 and BZIP2 compression support for kernel images. He briefly wrote, "As new compressors get invented, they tend to find their way into the kernel, yet we never prune superseded ones. It's time to do so...BZIP2 is drastically slower than other compressors we have, even when they achieve smaller sizes. It takes more memory, too. And, BZIP2 is not used anywhere else in the kernel -- just for booting the kernel itself and the initrd...LZMA1 is redundant with XZ (LZMA2), and unlike the latter, it uses its own copy of code that's not shared with anything else (some drivers use XZ). Let's drop it as well."

Borowski is recommending most kernel images be compressed with XZ while for those concerned about speed, Zstd is the recommendation. There are also other compression algorithms supported but they are used elsewhere or not otherwise deemed appropriate for dropping.

We'll see where this patch series goes in the post-4.20 kernel world.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week