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”?
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