FS#14733 - [mkinitcpio] add support for different compression types to mkinitcpio

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by Jens Pranaitis (jensp) - Saturday, 16 May 2009, 22:10 GMT
Last edited by Thomas Bächler (brain0) - Sunday, 07 June 2009, 12:25 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category Packages: Core
Status Closed
Assigned To Tobias Powalowski (tpowa)
Aaron Griffin (phrakture)
Thomas Bächler (brain0)
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 2
Private No

Details

Description:
Future kernels (starting from 2.6.30-rc5 iirc), allow the selection of different compression algorithms than gzip. It would be nice if mkinitcpio would offer some way to choose which algorithm to use when compressing the ramdisk. I made a minor patch to mkinitcpio 0.5.23-1 which allows setting the compression with COMPRESSION="foobar" in mkinitcpio.conf.

I just wanted to add a little thank you to all contributors of mkinitcpio IMHO it is one of the most brilliant little tools, which make Arch Linux so great :)

   mkinitcpio.diff (0.4 KiB)
This task depends upon

Closed by  Thomas Bächler (brain0)
Sunday, 07 June 2009, 12:25 GMT
Reason for closing:  Implemented
Additional comments about closing:  Will be in the upcoming mkinitcpio release.
Comment by Thomas Bächler (brain0) - Sunday, 17 May 2009, 12:39 GMT
Does "lzma -9" work this way (just like "gzip -9")? Anyway, I think supporting this is a good idea, lzma is as always a good candidate.
Comment by Jens Pranaitis (jensp) - Sunday, 17 May 2009, 17:25 GMT
Yep it works, I tried it with bzip2, lzma and gzip. LZMA saves ~30% space, compression takes notably longer, but I didn't notice any difference between decompressing lzma and gzip.
Comment by Greg (dolby) - Sunday, 17 May 2009, 18:01 GMT
Is lzma -9 recommended though? Cause the recent Slackware ChangeLog includes the following:
Recompressed expect-5.44.1.11-i486-3.txz, gv-3.6.7-i486-1.txz, pidgin-2.5.5-i486-3.txz, and xpdf-3.02pl3-i486-1.txz. These had been mistakenly compressed using xz -9.
Comment by Jens Pranaitis (jensp) - Sunday, 17 May 2009, 18:21 GMT
Well it's the command used to compress the kernel. So I guess it's fairly stable. Anyway I wasn't asking for lzma to become the default option, I just want the user to be able to set the compression method (without editing /sbin/mkinitcpio). xz seems to be a different userland tool than lzma-utils, but I don't know what the differences are (if there are any).
Comment by Thomas Bächler (brain0) - Saturday, 06 June 2009, 20:32 GMT
Thanks, implemented in my local git, expect this in the next release.

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