Re: [kernel.org users] XZ Migration discussion

[david]

On Sun, 14 Feb 2010, Stefan Richter wrote:

> Pavel Machek wrote:
> [Jean Delvare wrote]
> > > I have an old, slow machine here which I am going to use to perform
> > > some real world testing, and I'll post the results when I'm done. But I
> > > suspect that building a kernel on this machine, even a small one with
> > > just the drivers it needs, will take much longer than unpacking the
> > > sources. So anyone worrying about performance would rather rely on
> > > cross-compilation, and in turn can afford whatever decompression tool
> > > is needed.
> >
> > On zaurus, kernel compilation takes 4 hours. (I.e. "one night"). So
> > that one is ... well ... done overnight.
> >
> > Untar is something I normally wait for, since you need to run
> > (interactive) oldconfig after that.
>
> If the download takes m minutes and unpacking and unarchiving tar.gz
> takes another n minutes, what difference does it make for this workflow
> when instead m + p minutes are spent for download + unpacking and
> unarchiving tar.bz2 or tar.xz?

The difference is that the user is waiting for the n or m minutes, but 
goes off and does something else for the p minutes.

So it doesn't really matter if the compile takes 1 hour or 6 hours. As 
Pavel noted, this is done overnight and it doesn't matter if it gets done 
at 2am or 6am.

But the uncompression has a user waiting for it (to do the config step), 
so here it makes a big difference if it takes 6 minutes ot 8 minutes.

David Lang
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