On Sat, Jul 08, 2023 at 02:18:52AM +0200, Benjamin Drung wrote:
> Using xz -9 would give very good compression, but it takes very long
> (especially on slow development boards) and a lot of memory (good luck
> on Raspberry Pis with small memory like Pi Zeros).
Please also test decompression times for the various algorithms. I have
a special dislike for xz after seeing how long it takes even decent
machines to unpack Debian packages that were compressed with xz.
It's hard to know how exactly to balance compress and decompress times,
different users will have different ratios of booting vs installing
updates.
If it's possible to use zstd instead I bet it would provide faster
compression and decompression -- though at the cost of stressing those
tiny 512M /boot filesystems. (If we haven't switched to one or two
gigabytes by default, we ought to do that. I'm getting very tired of
teaching people how to recover from full /boot filesystems.)
Thanks
