I’m exploring ways to shave a few seconds off of my boot time, and I came across a post that stated, “my initrd is pretty small–doesn’t really load much–and Arch also defaults to using zstd which is also faster to decompress versus gzip.”

What compression does Pop! use for initrd and the kernel? When I run ls -al /boot, I see files such as 14M vmlinuz-6.4.6-76060406-generic and 119M initrd.img-6.4.6-76060406-generic. Are these compressed?

Lastly, is there a way to choose the compression of these boot files without a custom kernel build? Or is what I’m trying to do “off the beaten path” and going to lead to “you have to compile your own kernel from here on out”?

  • canadaduaneOPEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    When I check this file, it is already set at COMPRESS=zstd. However, I’m not sure if it’s working as I think, because the vmlinuz-6.4* kernel file is not a zstd file? Maybe it uses zstd for just a portion of the binary…