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

[Archange]

Le 21/02/2021 à 02:56, Geert Hendrickx via arch-general a écrit :
> 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.

Excepted that decompression is a blocking event for boot, while 
compression is async.

Anyway, based on the benchmark published on the PR that reverted to the 
default level, using -8 seems the best tradeoff for fast compression and 
small size, and −18 if space really is an issue (or you’re reading the 
file from a floppy…).

Also, on most systems nowadays we are talking about changes in the order 
of hundreds of milliseconds, while I take ~5s to type my entire LUKS 
passphrase on boot. So…