A kernel.org update
A kernel.org update
Posted Oct 31, 2013 13:58 UTC (Thu) by Jonno (subscriber, #49613)In reply to: A kernel.org update by dlang
Parent article: A kernel.org update
> IIRC, .bz2 is slower and larger than .xz (lzma), so it has no advantage
While there might be some pathological cases, in the general case:
xz -2 compresses faster, and usually better, than bzip2 -9.
xz -3 compresses better, and usually faster, than bzip2 -9.
xz always decompresses faster than bzip2.
While there might be some pathological cases, in the general case:
xz -2 compresses faster, and usually better, than bzip2 -9.
xz -3 compresses better, and usually faster, than bzip2 -9.
xz always decompresses faster than bzip2.
The decompression memory requirement of xz -2 (3 MiB) and -3 (5 MiB) are comparable to bzip2 -9 (4 MiB), but the compression memory requirement are slightly higher (17M / 32M compared to 8M).
xz -6 (the default) compresses even better, but compress is usually about an order of magnitude slower than bzip2 -9, and it requires a lot more memory (94 MiB to compress, 9 MiB to decompress). So xz -6 is not really a direct replacement for bzip2, but can make sense when distributing files that are compressed once but downloaded and decompressed many times.