I am pleased to announce the release of the lzip patch for linux 4.18.1.
Since 2016 I maintain a patch adding lzip decompression support to the
linux kernel. This includes support for lzip-compressed kernel image,
initramfs, initrd, modules, and squashfs filesystems. The patch
implements a linux module named lzip_decompress.
Lzip related components in the kernel
=====================================
The lzip_decompress module in lib/lzip_decompress.c provides a versatile
lzip decompression function able to do buffer to buffer decompression or
stream decompression with fill and flush callback functions. The usage
of the function is documented in include/linux/lzip.h.
For decompressing the kernel image, initramfs, and initrd, there is a
wrapper function in lib/decompress_lunzip.c providing the same common
interface as the other decompress_*.c files, which is defined in
include/linux/decompress/generic.h.
For kernel makefiles, two commands are provided in scripts/Makefile.lib
for use with $(call if_changed). The kernel image must be compressed
with $(call if_changed,klzip) which will append a four-byte trailer
containing the size of the uncompressed data, which is needed by the
boot code. Other things should be compressed with $(call if_changed,lzip).
Testing
=======
Xlunzip is a test tool for the lzip_decompress module. It is similar to
lunzip, but it uses the lzip_decompress module as a backend. The xlunzip
tarball contains a copy of the lzip_decompress module and can be
compiled and tested without downloading or applying the patch to the
kernel. The homepage of xlunzip is at
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xlunzip.html
The patch can be downloaded from
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/lzip/kernel/linux-4.18.1_lzip-2.diff.lz
The sha256sum is:
20ec09d46795768824a20aea3896e46f1ac06827792655a5a7aaec43bf18f301
linux-4.18.1_lzip-2.diff.lz
Please, test it and report any bugs you find.
Thanks,
Antonio Diaz, lzip author and maintainer.
--
If you are distributing software in xz format, please consider using
lzip instead. See http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip_benchmark.html#xz1 and
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html
_______________________________________________
Lzip-bug mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lzip-bug
