On Sat, Feb 20, 2021 at 21:25:21 +0100, mpan via arch-general wrote: > > I benchmarked it on my mkinitcpio image, and zstd with mkinitcpio's […] > Though you have benchmarked a wrong thing. It’s decompression time that > matters here, not compression. The image is compressed to make it load > faster during boot and that’s the important metric here. Compression time matters also, since on many systems an initramfs gets booted only once or a few times for every time one gets generated, and zstd -19 is ridiculously slow for larger files, However mkinitcpio v30 reverted to zstd's default compression level 3, which is much better. It's a different tradeoff for, say, a package that gets built once and downloaded thousands of times, for which bandwidth savings outweigh the compression overhead. Geert
