[Fedora-livecd-list] livecd-creator proposal for compression option

[Jasper Hartline]

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 9:51 PM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:


>> Introducing the option to compress without kernel support is a big
>> mistake I believe
>> especially when the only gain is for people who are using slower,
>> non-multiple core processors
>
> Why do you think only those people benefit. I would expect in many cases
> accessing the data is limited by disk I/O bandwidth and in that case lots
> of people could benefit.

I am not sure of the current benchmarks of disk I/O related data
which depicts any significant advantage over mksquashfs using zlib or
mksquashfs using lzma.
Do you have some benchmarks you can throw our way?

>> where they gain speed in creation of the ISO, but are not likely to be playing
>> those same games from that CD on that computer anyways, because gamers
>> don't use first generation pentiums
>> running at 1GHz.
>>
>> I think you are just jumping the gun and we need to focus on larger
>> problems related to livecd-tools than satisfying a small niche of
>> gamers by making 10% extra space and a handful of extra games
>
> You are free to focus on what is important to you. I plan to focus at
> least some of my resources on what is important to me.

400 MB is an insignificant gain in space saving to livecd-creator
target images, and you fail to
provide the actual uncompressed original sizes and final size using
mksquashfs w/ lzma.
This is insignificant and cannot be readily applied to any single scenario.

Just so you understand what I am getting at, a target ISO of 60MB
of a custom LiveCD I built, only shrank 10MB to 50MB using mksquashfs w/ lzma.
This is using the most minimal set of packages one could.

Where are you getting 400MB from? Because, that is not what I revealed
in my testing.
60 to 50MB is more than 10%, so you are saying the larger it gets the
worse space savings you get..
that is totally outrageous that you believe this is beneficial but not
something like adding 924K syslinux to the base DVD which benefits
many many people when they want to build a LiveCD with just the base
DVD as a repository source. Interesting that we are so enveloped in
ourselves we only see importance in what is as you said
> You are free to focus on what is important to you. I plan to focus at
> least some of my resources on what is important to me.

Try that more. 400MB is worse than 50 to 60MB, at more than 10%.
mksquashfs w/lzma makes the gain worse, when the targets get larger.


> It will in fact allow a few more well known games to be included in the
> games spin. That is mostly a marketting tool, bur being able to show off
> some more games is nice. It also effects people who want to run live usb
> images and want to limit the amount of space they use.
The amount of space is already limited, it;s already a SquashFS with
no more than 10% savings.


>> Maybe someone will disagree or perhaps some gamers will comment on
>> your post instead.
>
> It's really not a gamer issue. It is an enhancement in to the capabilities
> of live images, in that people will have the option to save additional
> space if they want. Probably lzma will be best to enable by default, but
> that will require most testing to see.
I think you're wasting your time trying this because it will be a
while before SquashFS w/ lzma is introduced
upstream for general use, and possibly longer before Fedora enables it
or puts it into stock.
Have fun.