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Linux EFI Zboot Abandoning "Compression Library Museum", Focusing On Gzip & Zstd
The Linux kernel EFI Zboot code for carrying the Linux kernel image for EFI systems in compressed form is doing away with its 'compression library museum' of offering Gzip, LZ4, LZMA, LZO, XZ, and Zstd compression options to instead just focus on Gzip and Zstd compression support.
- GZIP is tried and tested, and is still one of the fastest at decompression time, although the compression ratio is not very high; moreover, Fedora is already shipping EFI zboot kernels for arm64 that use GZIP, and QEMU implements direct support for it when booting a kernel without firmware loaded; - ZSTD has a very high compression ratio (although not the highest), and is almost as fast as GZIP at decompression time. Reducing the number of options makes it less of a hassle for other consumers of the EFI zboot format (such as QEMU today, and kexec in the future) to support it transparently without having to carry 7 different decompression libraries."
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