On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:23 PM, David W Noon <dwn...@ntlworld.com> wrote: > On Wed, 30 Nov 2011 19:39:11 -0500, Michael Mol wrote about "Re: > [gentoo-user] Re: Full disk encryption": > > [snip] >>Stupid question...Would using LZMA and a tarball reduce the size of >>your initeamfs? > > Not really. I am already using gzip -9, and binaries don't compress > especially well. Moreover, the archiver *must* be cpio, not tar.
I don't understand initrd that well, but I understand you run an init-type script inside it. My thought was: 1) Include enough in your cpio blob to extract a .tar.xz file. Even better if you can use a self-extracting, statically-linked LZMAball. 2) launch a second-stage init sequence from the subsequently-extracted data. Large groups of binaries can compress pretty well, but, obviously, it depends greatly on the data in question. Also, wasn't there an ELF-specific compressor making the rounds a few months ago? And I take it there are no existing tools to take a dynamically-linked binary, pack in all the pulled-in files, rewrite symbol tables to include only the symbols used, pull the thing all into a single now-statically-linked binary, and perform something like COMDAT folding to remove duplicate functions? It would seem possible, at least. -- :wq
