14 DAY TRIAL // Colin Ian King, a Ubuntu Engineer working in the Kernel Team at Canonical, published a blog article with some of the boot improvements made in the upcoming Ubuntu 19.10 operating system.
According to Colin Ian King, the Ubuntu Kernel Team worked hard during the past few months to find a faster compression/decompression algorithm for the upcoming Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine) operating system, which will hit the streets later this fall on October 17th.
The Ubuntu Kernel Team benchmarked six compression methods for the initramfs, including BZIP2, GZIP, LZ4, LZMA, LZMO and XZ, to measure the loading time of the Linux kernel, as well as the decompression time. The benchmarking was conducted on x86 configurations using the x86 TSC (Time Stamp Counter).
In the end, they realized that LZ4 is the best compression/decompression method for Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine) as BZIP2, LZMA, and XZ were slow to decompress, while LZ4 was over seven times faster than GZIP. On the other hand, LZO was about 1.25 times faster then GZIP, but not fast enough.
"Even with slow spinning media and a slow CPU, the longer load time of the LZ4 kernel is overcome by the far faster decompression time. As media gets faster, the load time difference between GZIP, LZ4 and LZO diminishes and the decompression time becomes the dominant speed factor with LZ4 the clear winner," said Colin Ian King.
LZ4 will be used as default decompression for Ubuntu 19.10
LZ4 was already used by default in Ubuntu, since the Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) release, but it looks like Canonical will keep as default compression/decompression method for the kernels and initramfs in the Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine) operating system.
LZ4 is a lossless data compression algorithm that offers extremely fast compression and decompression speeds. In Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine), LZ4 will be available for the x86 (64-bit), PPC64le (PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian), and s390 (IBM System z) kernels.