I’m exploring ways to shave a few seconds off of my boot time, and I came across a post that stated, “my initrd is pretty small–doesn’t really load much–and Arch also defaults to using zstd which is also faster to decompress versus gzip.”

What compression does Pop! use for initrd and the kernel? When I run ls -al /boot, I see files such as 14M vmlinuz-6.4.6-76060406-generic and 119M initrd.img-6.4.6-76060406-generic. Are these compressed?

Lastly, is there a way to choose the compression of these boot files without a custom kernel build? Or is what I’m trying to do “off the beaten path” and going to lead to “you have to compile your own kernel from here on out”?

  • TOR-anon1@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    Go to /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf and change:

    compress=gzip

    to

    compress=ztsd

    and run:

    sudo update-initramfs -u -k all
        • canadaduane@lemmy.caOPEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          How would I check? Like this?

          $ zstd -l vmlinuz-6.4.6-76060406-generic 
Frames  Skips  Compressed  Uncompressed  Ratio  Check  Filename
File "vmlinuz-6.4.6-76060406-generic" not compressed by zstd
            • canadaduane@lemmy.caOPEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              Wow, this told me much more than I expected; however, I’m still not sure if it’s zstd:

              /boot/vmlinuz-6.4.6-76060406-generic: Linux kernel x86 boot executable bzImage, version 6.4.6-76060406-generic (jenkins@warp.pop-os.org) #202307241739~1694621917~22.04~ac5e1a8 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Wed S, RO-rootFS, swap_dev 0XD, Normal VGA

              bzImage sounds like…bzip2, maybe?

              • TOR-anon1@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                No. BZ stands for Big zImange. The kernel is compressed.

                To see what compression was used:

                zgrep CONFIG_KERNEL_ /proc/config.gz

                Try file on the initrd instead.

                • canadaduane@lemmy.caOPEnglish
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  Ah, thanks! Slightly different location, but basically the same. Here we go:

                  $ grep CONFIG_KERNEL_ /boot/config-6.4.6-76060406-generic
# CONFIG_KERNEL_GZIP is not set
# CONFIG_KERNEL_BZIP2 is not set
# CONFIG_KERNEL_LZMA is not set
# CONFIG_KERNEL_XZ is not set
# CONFIG_KERNEL_LZO is not set
# CONFIG_KERNEL_LZ4 is not set
CONFIG_KERNEL_ZSTD=y

                  So the kernel is “zstd” compressed.

                  OTOH, I’m not sure if this means anything about initrd (ASCII cpio archive??)

                  $ file /boot/initrd.img-6.4.6-76060406-generic 
/boot/initrd.img-6.4.6-76060406-generic: ASCII cpio archive (SVR4 with no CRC)
    • canadaduane@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      When I check this file, it is already set at COMPRESS=zstd. However, I’m not sure if it’s working as I think, because the vmlinuz-6.4* kernel file is not a zstd file? Maybe it uses zstd for just a portion of the binary…

  • pnutzh4x0rAEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Pop already uses zstd for its initramfs. You can check by looking at /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf.

    There was an issue where they were considering switching to xz to save space, but when I tried that, it actually made things slower, so I’d avoid that if possible:

    https://github.com/pop-os/default-settings/issues/168

  • CameronDev@programming.devEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I’d be curious to know how uncompressed fairs if you test it. But i think you’re really getting into minimal gains territory…

  • surewhynotlem@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I wouldn’t focus on faster decompression.

    Disk read speed is almost always the bottleneck. I think you’ll find that smaller file sizes, even if the decompress takes slightly longer, are faster overall because they save disk I/O.

    YMMV based on your hardware, of course.