Well, ok, I flipped out a bit. Not the first time. Sorry. I'm a little
off balance.

I intend to finish this patch on my way out the door, as I'm going to
finish it anyway. Use it or not, doesn't matter.

The code is simple and really already done, but these BBC extensions
to JFFS2 had me a little off target for a few minutes, since it
largely replaces the original JFFS2 code, but leaves the deprecated
code sitting around for good looks.

In a previous mail I described priority mode compression where the
encoders are selected based on their rank. I should note that size
mode is also available with JFFS2 BBC. I knew it was available in
mkfs.jffs2, but looking at the fs/jffs2/compr.c source, it appeared as
if it wasn't with JFFS2. Little did I know that source wasn't the
post-BBC'd JFFS2 file system driver. Size mode iterates through
available compressors, trying each one and selecting the best size. I
just wanted to be correct here.

For those worrying about LZMA speed, here's my analyais:

1.) Remember, post-install LZMA compression is not supported by this
patch. Compression speed is therefore not an issue. However, when it
is eventually added, it may improve the current write speed because
you can replace 5 or so compressors with one. Also, with these measly
4Kb blocks, compression speed is hardly an issue with any algorithm.
2.) Decoding speed may be a little bit slower than ZLIB, but still
it's going to be substantially faster than SquashFs-LZMA due to the
smaller block size. It's plenty fast enough.

Therefore, I am pretty certain that LZMA decoding speed won't be an
issue, and in the future LZMA encoding speed won't be an issue either.

That said, this patch really should be done 'up stream' from
Free/OpenWrt. I don't know why this hasn't been done before, maybe
nobody has thought of just adding the decoder and instead focused on
why adding the LZMA C++ encoder is problematic.

I'm still really new to the linux kernel, but I think I can pull this
off successfully without any big issues. I'll send target/ style
patches to patch the JFFS2-BBC code.

--
Jeremy Collake (db90h)
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