Re: [PATCH] linux-firmware: Compress firmware on disk

[Michael Tremer <michael.tremer@ipfire.org>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1888 bytes --]

Hello,

Oh, this would be entirely linux-firmware since the last nightly build generated an update for x86_64 of 7.8 MiB.

I find it very interesting to see that Zstandard is so much better at recompressing this. We use XZ for the core update, but the distribution image in the ISO file is compressed using Zstandard.

286 MiB is way too large and absolutely not worth it.

I will test a couple of things and will then get back to you.

Best,
-Michael

> On 24 Mar 2022, at 10:55, Peter Müller <peter.mueller(a)ipfire.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello Michael,
> 
> well, contrary to your expectation, shipping the compressed linux-firmware leads to an way too big update:
> 
> $ cat ./install/packages/meta-core-upgrade-166
> Name: core-upgrade
> Summary: IPFire Core Update
> ProgVersion: 2.27
> Release: 166
> Size: 299315200
> Dependencies: 
> File: core-upgrade-2.27-166.ipfire
> Services: 
> $ ls -lah ./install/packages/core-upgrade-2.27-166.ipfire
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 286M 24. Mar 10:43 ./install/packages/core-upgrade-2.27-166.ipfire
> 
> I do not have the figure ready how much of that 286 MByte are caused by linux-firmware, but
> it has to be way more than 100 MBytes. Otherwise, Core 166 would have been to big already, which
> I doubt when looking at the currently included filelists.
> 
> Thanks, and best regards,
> Peter Müller
> 
> 
>> Hello,
>> 
>> So Peter has merged this patch now and it has resulted in an increase of about 70M of the ISO image. This is expected since we are now compressing everything individually which will give us a worse compression ratio.
>> 
>> I assume that the updater would grow in a similar size which is probably acceptable to me.
>> 
>> Since we suffer from bloated Core Updates, I wanted to double-check with everybody that this is okay for everybody else, too.
>> 
>> Best,
>> -Michael