[arch-general] [arch-announce] Moving to Zstandard images by default on mkinitcpio

[Geert Hendrickx]

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