> > 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...)..