Re: [PATCH 3/6] Add support for LZO-compressed kernels

Andrew Morton
2009-08-04T23:00:57Z

On Mon, 3 Aug 2009 16:58:18 +0200
Albin Tonnerre <albin.tonnerre@free-electrons.com> wrote:

> This is the first part of the lzo patch
> The lzo compressor is worse than gzip at compression, but faster at
> extraction. Here are some figures for an ARM board I'm working on:
>
> Uncompressed size: 3.24Mo
> gzip 1.61Mo 0.72s
> lzo 1.75Mo 0.48s
>
> So for a compression ratio that is still relatively close to gzip, it's
> much faster to extract, at least in that case.

Is 3.2Mb a typical kernel size for small systems? It sounds large.

0.24 seconds booting speedup sounds pretty thin. Adding a new
decompression format will introduce more configuration/build/deployment
complexities. How do we justify this?

Did anyone look into just speeding up the gzip decompressor?

> +#ifdef STATIC

What is this STATIC thing for?