Re: [PATCH 3/5] Add support for LZO-compressed kernels

H. Peter Anvin
2009-07-22T16:32:31Z

kevin.granade@gmail.com wrote:
> >
> > So for a compression ratio that is still relatively close to gzip, it's
> > much faster to extract, at least in that case.
>
> Is that "time to run the extraction algorithm", or "time to read in
> image from media and extract"? I think the time to read from the media
> would tend to dominate the decompression time.
> Either way, could you provide the other time for each algorithm in order
> to give a sense of how this might scale to other CPU speeds/media read
> speeds?
>

If you have very slow media, you probably want to use LZMA. If you have
a very slow CPU and comparatively fast media, LZO might be a good
option... I have heard people asking for *uncompressed* kernels for this
reason, but LZO runs at a significant fraction of memcpy() speed.

-hpa