On Sat, Feb 20, 2021 at 21:25:21 +0100, mpan via arch-general wrote:
I benchmarked it on my mkinitcpio image, and zstd with mkinitcpio's […] Though you have benchmarked a wrong thing. It’s decompression time that matters here, not compression. The image is compressed to make it load faster during boot and that’s the important metric here.
Compression time matters also, since on many systems an initramfs gets booted only once or a few times for every time one gets generated, and zstd -19 is ridiculously slow for larger files, However mkinitcpio v30 reverted to zstd's default compression level 3, which is much better. It's a different tradeoff for, say, a package that gets built once and downloaded thousands of times, for which bandwidth savings outweigh the compression overhead. Geert