Arch Linux

indignation

Member

Registered: 2020-11-30

Posts: 9

Should I compress my initramfs if I'm already doing fs-level compres.?

The arch utility mkinitcpio by default compresses with zstd. I already compress my root (mounted at /) and boot (mounted at /boot) filesystem using zstd btrfs compression (only my first partition is vfat32 and mounted at /efi, due to its natural constraints - yes, I'm doing full disk encryption ). That's why I set

COMPRESSION="cat"

in my /etc/mkinitcpio.conf, since the initramfs resides on /boot. Does this make sense or am I misunderstanding something?

GaKu999

Member

From: US/Eastern

Registered: 2020-06-21

Posts: 696

Re: Should I compress my initramfs if I'm already doing fs-level compres.?

Data compression with btrfs is not done willy nilly, it first checks if it benefits from it, if it does not compress (that is, end smaller) or is already compressed, it leaves it as is.
So, in the end, both ways change nothing really.

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My repos • Some snippets

Heisenberg might have been here.

indignation

Member

Registered: 2020-11-30

Posts: 9

Re: Should I compress my initramfs if I'm already doing fs-level compres.?

@GaKu999 I have forced the compression on btrfs, so I presume that's all I need!