lzma compression on official isos vs Deltaisos

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 17:32:14 -0400,
  Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> wrote:
> That said, I have noticed that install off USB thumb drive is faster than DVD by 
> a good bit, even though the transfer rate off a DVD is almost certainly faster. 
> This suggests that seek is the limiting factor delay rather than transfer rate. 

That's what I would expect. live DVD images are pretty unusable for doing real
stuff on them. They are very slow to boot and unless you stay in a few
applications (so that what you need is in ram), it's very slow to do things.

Live USB images are a lot more usable.

> Therefore you comment about seek and squashfs is interesting, and open the 
> question of whether it would be better to use an uncompressed ISO filesystem and 
> better compression on the RPMs. I wouldn't guess without testing.

For live images better compression for rpms isn't really relevant as they
aren't on the final image. The rpms are installed into an image which is
shrunk and then written to a squashfs file system that is then written to
the iso image.