Zstd instead of xz?

ARM General ARM Discussion
1

Might I suggest to compress the installation images with zstd instead of xz?

2

I’ve been doing this for a few months without issue. Haven’t checked to see whether it’s faster.

3

+1

Since Manjaro is 64-bit only and ancient old machines (like most of 32bit CPUs) are not supported, it makes sense to compress installation image with zstd:15 to make it smaller, or find some balance between decompressing speed and CPU saturation for typical reference example - Pentium dual or quad core, or similar.

4

There’s a couple of reasons why we haven’t done this. We have thought about it a while ago.

  1. Etcher does not support .zst compressed files, while it does support .xz.
  2. Our own “Manjaro ARM Flasher” does not support it, yet…
1 Like
5

do we want zstd?

6

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=2021-Linux-Zstd-Firmware

Your benchs are one year old. Zstd is now 1.4.8 and has lots of improvements. It was already improved with the 1.45 release on May 2020.