On 12/29/2016 11:47 PM, Christoph Biedl wrote: > Eduard Bloch wrote... > >> I volunteer as test subject for that experiment. I would appreciate even >> small steps, considering the current laptop in front of me with average >> magnetic HDD. Over a minute boot time, which is insane and IMHO mostly >> caused by the storm of IO operations required nowadays. > > At the risk of damping your expectations - I was surprised if there was > as noticeable improvement. Perhaps on broken (i.e. slow) bootloaders > where a smaller initrd gets loaded faster.
Note that compression support in kmod will not help initramfs, as they are always compressed anyway - at least in the default setting in Debian. Compression could reduce the size of the modules loaded during boot _after_ the initramfs has given up control - but since the problem with HDDs is seek time, I have my doubts whether compression for modules will actually improve that on HDDs; while the totality of modules may be quite large nowadays (and we might want to compress them to save space on /), the individual module files are not that large, and the seek times are so horrible only because one needs to load so many of them. Furthermore I doubt that module loading is going to be the main culprit for I/O during boot - consider how much stuff has to be read from disk these days for userspace applications. tl;dr: I don't think compression modules will increase boot times on HDDs in any significant manner, but it may be a good idea to support that just to reduce the amount of space required on disk. Regards, Christian
