Re: Linux Kernel Source Compression

[Joshua Hudson]

On 5/22/06, H. Peter Anvin <hpa@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Alistair John Strachan wrote:
[snip]
> > Seriously, though, if I understand gzip correctly, it uses deflate/zlib
> > internally. Why, in that case, does /bin/gzip not (dynamically) link against
> > libz? If a first step was fixing that, a second could be linking dynamically
> > against libbz2 and 'liblzma', and making it all compile-time configurable.
> >
>
> Because gzip predates zlib...
Also because it runs faster than zlib on x86 due to register pressure.
Relocatable
code costs one register. x86 only has 7 that an algorithm can scribble over
(8 if it doesn't have any stack).
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