Package: tiny-initramfs-core
Version: 0.1-5+b10
Severity: wishlist
Dear Debian folks,
I only learned about tiny-initramfs today, when Ben Hutchings told me
about it. What a great program! Thank you for packaging it for Debian.
On my test device, the resulting initrd is 1.3 MB big:
-rw------- 1 root root 1,3M 8. Dez 20:15
/boot/initrd.img-5.9.0-3-amd64
The resulting boot time is 12.6 ms:
[ 0.199542] calling populate_rootfs+0x0/0x109 @ 1
[ 0.199574] Trying to unpack rootfs image as initramfs...
[ 0.212449] Freeing initrd memory: 1328K
[ 0.212455] initcall populate_rootfs+0x0/0x109 returned 0 after
12606 usecs
Using a different compression algorithm, can improve this even more.
For example, LZ4 is expected to increase the image size but to be much
faster when decompressing.
Editing `/usr/sbin/mktirfs` to use `lz4 -9 -l` (copied from `mkinitramfs`)
find . ! -name . -print0 | sort -z | cpio --null -o --quiet -R 0:0
-H newc | lz4 -9 -l >> "$image_name"
and running `sudo update-tirfs`, the initrd image size increases a
little to 1.6 MB:
-rw------- 1 root root 1,6M 8. Dez 21:37 initrd.img-5.9.0-3-amd64
But loading and unpacking takes now only 3.6 ms:
[ 0.203611] calling populate_rootfs+0x0/0x109 @ 1
[ 0.203638] Trying to unpack rootfs image as initramfs...
[ 0.207279] Freeing initrd memory: 1552K
[ 0.207289] initcall populate_rootfs+0x0/0x109 returned 0 after
3588 usecs
So, it’d be really great, if the compression algorithm could be changed.
Kind regards,
Paul
PS: For the record, here is my initrd content:
```
$ lsinitramfs /boot/initrd.img-5.9.0-3-amd64
kernel
kernel/x86
kernel/x86/microcode
kernel/x86/microcode/.enuineIntel.align.0123456789abc
kernel/x86/microcode/GenuineIntel.bin
crc16.ko
crc32c_generic.ko
crc32c-intel.ko
crct10dif_common.ko
crct10dif_generic.ko
crc-t10dif.ko
crct10dif-pclmul.ko
dev
ext4.ko
init
jbd2.ko
mbcache.ko
mmc_block.ko
mmc_core.ko
modules
nvme-core.ko
nvme.ko
proc
scsi_mod.ko
sd_mod.ko
t10-pi.ko
target
```
