On Tue, 2025-02-18 at 17:43 +0100, Diederik de Haas wrote: > On Tue Feb 18, 2025 at 5:19 PM CET, Raul Tambre wrote: > > In my case I have to install firmware from linux-firmware myself due > > to having very new hardware. So not directly applicable to Debian's > > own shipped firmware but for some users it's still relevant. This > > actually has been enabled in > > <https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/linux/-/commit/dfee9b4caabb60d008616f0a2875d069d4c82ea2> > > but the closer was missed before the 6.13.3-1~exp1 upload. > > I think it's useful to enable FW_LOADER_COMPRESS_ZSTD which seems a bit > of a misnomer as it supports loading (=decompressing?) zstd compressed > archives. > > My issue was that I think 50MB larger compressed archives, is a > significant increase and the (only?) benefit is that *compression* is > much faster (but that only needs to be done once). > Next to the additional distribution costs, I think we should also keep > in mind that not everyone has a 1Gb+ unmetered internet connection.
The shortening of "compress" to "compression" can indeed be a bit confusing. Note that firmware files shipped by Debian are uncompressed, sans the compression of the .deb itself. initramfs-tools already defaults to Zstd, but that's for the initramfs image itself. This is really only relevant if you're looking to compress the firmware files as unpacked on the disk. On faster systems with sufficient RAM you'd probably still prefer Zstd despite the size increase due to the significantly faster decompression. Note that the 50 MB was the total increase for all firmware files in linux-firmware, which total some 1.9 GB. Raul
