2009/12/3 Dave Miner <dminer at opensolaris.org>: > Mike Gerdts wrote: > ... >> >> - How compressible is bytecode compared to uncompiled code? That is, >> once it is put into a compressed disk image format, how much space is >> really being saved? >> > > All of Mike's points are well-taken, especially this one. An argument that > "it might help the Live CD" without data to back it up is not going > anywhere. Essentially all of the contents of the live CD are compressed in > one way or another already, be it by lofi (using lzma) for the major parts > that stay on the media, or gzip (or dcfs) for the root archive, so proposing > to compress them by other means is relatively unlikely to lead to actual > observed benefit. > > I'll further add that, in at least some instances, we've actually seen > adverse impacts based on some of the recent projects. For example, the > recent conversion of cut(1) and other objects to ksh93 built-ins actually > increased the size of the ramdisk required on SPARC by a couple of > megabytes.
Could you please elaborate where these megabytes should come from? ksh93 is /bin/sh in Opensolaris and to run ksh93 you must have the ksh93 libraries installed. The new version of cut(1) is a small executable which reuses these libraries which are already part of the system core, i.e. the actual change was to reduce the existing cut(1) to a 20k executable and flip a switch in the package system. I believe that this is unlikely to add 'a couple of megabytes'. Irek
