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kdar

Member

From: Sweet home Alabama!

Registered: 2009-06-27

Posts: 356

Compression utility built into kernel?

Can compression utility (say gzip) be integrated into kernel? (making it a module in a custom kernel)

Last edited by kdar (2013-03-07 23:45:39)

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,330

Website

Re: Compression utility built into kernel?

To what end (i.e. Why)?

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kdar

Member

From: Sweet home Alabama!

Registered: 2009-06-27

Posts: 356

Re: Compression utility built into kernel?

Well.. I was thinking to make performance of compression more efficient (in energy for example)... especially in a networking environment (cloud?), where large amount of lossless data have to be downloaded or uploaded.

I just found about e3compr for ext3... not sure how this can be used.. or if it is used somewhere with ext3.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/e3compr/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3#Compression

Last edited by kdar (2013-03-08 02:10:20)

cfr

Member

From: Cymru

Registered: 2011-11-27

Posts: 7,152

Re: Compression utility built into kernel?

Would it automatically be more energy efficient if it was in the kernel? Genuinely curious about this...

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ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,324

Re: Compression utility built into kernel?

I assume it is in there already.  Look at the "File" /proc/config.gz  ; it is a gz version of the configuration file of the running kernel.

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falconindy

Developer

From: New York, USA

Registered: 2009-10-22

Posts: 4,111

Website

Re: Compression utility built into kernel?

There's a number of compression routines already present in the kernel. Think about the support for lzo, lzma, bzip2, gzip and xz compressed bzImages and initramfs images.

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WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: Compression utility built into kernel?

^^^ This is exactly why those are the choices present in compressing the initramfs.  Think about it, with no userspace tools present, how else would the initramfs be decompressed when it is stored in these formats?