xz is better sizewise. The speed does not matter: modules are very small, only a small number of them are loaded and only once.

It's not the time spent on loading the modules that matters.
It's the time spent compressing them (the whole initrd).

zstd -9 takes less than 5% the time by xz -6.

It was about "universal initramfs file" containing all the modules.

If you leave modules uncompressed and compress the whole initrd, it will explode when the initrd is loaded because all the uncompressed modules would use lots of RAM. The idea is to compress all the modules individually with xz. Look at the initrd of the slackware install disk. When the boot loader loads the initrd, the modules stay compressed, so RAM is saved. Only those modules that are then modprobed are uncompressed. The time to do the compressing of modules does not matter, and PV does the compressing once. It's not much: I use xz to compress my bzImage, modules and firmware files.

it is about the whole initramfs size
xz: smaller, faster load from disk
zstd: bigger, very faster decompression in memory

Has anyone else noticed that KDEs 'ark' in slackware64-current will no longer open *.tar.bz2 archives.

I just noticed it today because I very seldom run into bz2 archives.

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/rele...apshot.tar.bz2

Tried several others also to no avail.

I also 'downgraded' to ark in the 15.0 repository but installed in current.... also a no-go.

However... in a complete 15.0 setup.... no problem.

So, it's something else that changed between 15.0 & current.


tar itself with the -j option extracts it just fine... so it's not a tar nor a bzip problem.

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The patch:
https://invent.kde.org/utilities/ark/-/commit/9bcbcb05

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Thank you, marav.

Patrick, could you please apply that patch and place it in current ?

Thanks in advance.

Hmmmm....
Since current has shared-mime-info-2.3-x86_64-1

Is that patch going to work, or will it still get dropped ?

Guess we'll only be able to find out by testing after the patch is applied.


Also... no need to bother with it right now.

Might-as-well just wait till the KDE team releases the patched package(s).

Till then we can just use tar -j

Yep, just tested. It works fine

Ark-23.08.3 will be released on Nov. 9, 2023

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Thanks again marav.

Well... that answers that.

Downgraded to ... [ installed ] - shared-mime-info-2.1-x86_64-3

Now ark 23.08.2 opens that .tar.bz2 without a problem.

Compressing individual modules is a good idea. There are however still two things that I don't quite understand --

1) The initrd will be removed from memory once the real init takes over, so what's the problem of it occupying a few hundred megabytes of memory for just a few seconds?

2) Compressing once looks good, but note that loading and decompression also happen for only once before the next kernel update if the system never reboots (could be suspended to disk).

On all the servers and workstations I manage I load the whole /lib/modules directory from /boot/initrd-tree/init in the form of a zstd compressed squashfs. It does not explode even the memory of tiny embedded systems and virtual machines.

I completely agree that your solution is good. I'm just saying that there are alternatives with advantages and possibly disadvantages.

linux-6.6
https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/ker...nux-6.6.tar.xz

Marav, Pat, Gentlemen, start your engines.

It might be worth noting that the 6.1 kernel in Slackware current is a longterm kernel which hopefully will get updates some years after Slackware 15.1 has been released. This is probably why current uses the 6.1 kernel rather than the latest stable 6.5 kernel.

regards Henrik

Hello

With the new kernel config, tests in mkinitrd for adding /sbin/jfs_fsck and /sbin/xfs_repair in the tree are never true.

Kernel 6.1 is super-long-term stable (SLTS) so it will be kept for Slackware 15.1

Only after the release of 15.1 can we talk about a new kernel for Slackware64-current!

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I have no hopes for the Slackware 15.1 with Plasma5 to be released before everybody else will ship Plasma6 . Yep, there will be the glorious Slackware 14.2 all over again. It's not crystal clear for everybody?

And that's plenty of time to have another LTS kernel or even two...

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