On Friday 21 December 2007 20:04, Robert Millan wrote: > How well does compression work for GRUB 2 ? core.img is already compressed > (with lzo); if LZMA makes better results perhaps it'd be a good idea to > switch.
It's not that simple. LZO was chosen instead of gzip, because of the size requirement on PC. To preserve safety, we need to keep the core part less than 31.5KB (63 sectors). The size is the sum of non-compressable bootstrap code, decompression code and compressed code + data. When I made an experiment in PUPA, although gzip had a better compression ratio, due to the decompression code size, LZO won. I don't know precisely, but I suspect that decompression code for LZMA would be slightly larger than gzip's (IIRC, a range coder is likely to require more code and data). So I don't expect that LZMA can replace the current usage of LZO in normal PC so easily. Okuji _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel