Now using Zstandard instead of xz for package compression
1–10 of 155 posts
Re: Now using Zstandard instead of xz for package compression
#2Zstd has an enormous advantage in compression and, especially, decompression speed. It often doesn't compress quite as much, but we don't care as much as we once did. We rebuild packages more than we once did.
This looks like a very good move. Debian should follow suit.
Re: Now using Zstandard instead of xz for package compression
#3For those who want a TLDR :
The trade off is 0.8% increase of package size for 1300% increase in decompression speed.
Those numbers come from a sample of 542 packages.
Re: Now using Zstandard instead of xz for package compression
#4> If you nevertheless haven't updated libarchive since 2018, all hope is not lost! Binary builds of pacman-static are available from Eli Schwartz' personal repository, signed with their Trusted User keys, with which you can perform the update.
I am a little shocked that they bothered; Arch is rolling release and explicitly does not support partial upgrades (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/System_maintenance#Part...). So to hit this means that you didn't update a rather important library for over a year, which officially implies that you didn't update at all for over a year, which... is unlikely to be sensible.
Re: Now using Zstandard instead of xz for package compression
#5> If you nevertheless haven't updated libarchive since 2018, all hope is not lost! Binary builds of pacman-static are available from Eli Schwartz' personal repository, signed with their Trusted User keys, with which you can perform the update. I am a little shocked that they bothered; Arch is rolling release and explicitly does not support partial upgrades ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/System_maintenance#Par…
Arch is actually surprisingly stable and even with infrequent updates on the order of months still upgrades cleanly most of the time. The caveats to this were the great period of instability when switching to systemd, changing the /usr/lib layout, etc but those changes are now pretty far in the past.
Re: Now using Zstandard instead of xz for package compression
#6> If you nevertheless haven't updated libarchive since 2018, all hope is not lost! Binary builds of pacman-static are available from Eli Schwartz' personal repository, signed with their Trusted User keys, with which you can perform the update. I am a little shocked that they bothered; Arch is rolling release and explicitly does not support partial upgrades ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/System_maintenance#Par…
Arch is actually surprisingly stable and even with infrequent updates on the order of months still upgrades cleanly most of the time. The caveats to this were the great period of instability when switching to systemd, changing the /usr/lib layout, etc but those changes are now pretty far in the past.
Sure, and I've done partial upgrades and it was mostly fine:) It just surprised me to see the devs going out of their way to support it on volunteer time. On the other hand, maybe that's exactly the reason; maybe someone said "hey look, I can make static packages that are immune to library changes! I guess I'll publish these in case they're useful". Open source is fun like that:)
Re: Now using Zstandard instead of xz for package compression
#7> If you nevertheless haven't updated libarchive since 2018, all hope is not lost! Binary builds of pacman-static are available from Eli Schwartz' personal repository, signed with their Trusted User keys, with which you can perform the update. I am a little shocked that they bothered; Arch is rolling release and explicitly does not support partial upgrades ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/System_maintenance#Par…
You're shocked that they consider and plan for a worst-case/edge-case scenario?
That sort of attention to detail is what continues to impress me about the Arch methodology.
Re: Now using Zstandard instead of xz for package compression
#8For those who want a TLDR : The trade off is 0.8% increase of package size for 1300% increase in decompression speed. Those numbers come from a sample of 542 packages.
thanks, a great change for those with SSDs
Re: Now using Zstandard instead of xz for package compression
#9> If you nevertheless haven't updated libarchive since 2018, all hope is not lost! Binary builds of pacman-static are available from Eli Schwartz' personal repository, signed with their Trusted User keys, with which you can perform the update. I am a little shocked that they bothered; Arch is rolling release and explicitly does not support partial upgrades ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/System_maintenance#Par…
That's only not sensible if you continued to use that computer for the year. You might have just not used it for a year, which doesn't seem unlikely. In fact I just updated my Arch desktop, which I had indeed not used for more than a year :)
Re: Now using Zstandard instead of xz for package compression
#10Fedora 31 switched RPM to use zstd.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Switch_RPMs_to_zstd_c...
Package installations are quite a bit faster, and while I don't have any numbers I expect that the ISO image compose times are faster, since it performs an installation from RPM to create each of the images.
Hopefully in the near future the squashfs image on those ISOs will use zstd, not only for the client side speed boost for boot and install, but it cuts the CPU hit for lzma decompression by a lot (more than 50%). https://pagure.io/releng/issue/8581