Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 15 Dec 1997 01:30:17 -0500 (EST) | From | linux kernel account <> | Subject | Re: OFFTOPIC: Re: bzip2 for kernel dists? |
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On Mon, 15 Dec 1997, Mike Kilburn wrote:
> > Probably a bad idea; bzip2 takes a lot of memory to decompress, which > > *really* isn't what you want for booting a low-memory system... > > Depends why your using a compressed image. In the case of a dedicated > route/firewall we have plenty of RAM but boot flash is limited either > by cost or by the motherboard in the case of SBCs. I just checked our > router code and if we could use bzip2 for the root ramdisk and kernel > we would save 66K of boot flash. That is very significant if your > motherboard limits your flash to 1.5M. >
Hmm.. I just tried bzip2ing vmlinux.. Not a big improvement.
file size decomp time mem used (size the process grew to) vmlinux 1301377 0 0 vmlinux.gz 589137 0.54 seconds 376k vmlinux.bz 553017 04.64 seconds 5.5megs vmlinux.bz2 557390 02.83 seconds 4.7megs vmlinux.lzo 645053 0.06 seconds 0 (decompressor able to decompress in place)
Tell me, in your routers could your clients stand a longer then 1 minute wait just for kernel decompression (that would not be a poor guess at the decompress time on a 386/25...)..
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