Re: OFFTOPIC: Re: bzip2 for kernel dists?
Mike Kilburn (mike@conexio.co.za)
Mon, 15 Dec 1997 07:33:58 +0200 (SAT)
> >
> > While on the topic of using bzip2 why doesn't somebody
> > write bzip2 support for compressed kernel images. I don't
> > know enough about kernel internals to do it myself. But if
> > nobody wants to do it, I'll hack away....
> >
>
> 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.