[OLPC-devel] Re: Not so good news (Was: good news)

[Ronald G Minnich]

Carl-Daniel U. Hailfinger wrote:

> What we need from you is a way to use nrv2b compressed ELF images as payload. Please don't say that is impossible.

I've been doing that for quite some time for different circumstances. 
It's easy to set up. Yh Lu put support in some time ago. I was not that 
happy with how it was done, but it's there.

I just want to NOT put a lot of time into this if we are going to then 
jump to lzma. I don't want to thrash around a lot on this. I also want 
to make sure that at every point, buildrom is usable by everyone -- no 
surprises for users. That's why I wanted to hold off on the commits -- 
one thing at a time.

Also, when I did measure it, I found that
the size of (bzImage + gzip'ed initrd) was smaller than (nrv2b 
compressed mkelfimage output with vmlinux and initrd). Maybe something 
changed, but I would like to see the numbers one more time on final 
output. So do a buildrom pass and let me know what you're seeing on olpc 
.elf file vs. what you are doing. Final numbers of the payload, I mean.

There is a reason I went back to mkelfimage with bzimage and gzip'ed 
initrd. nrv2b is not that terrific at compression. But what you are 
doing may still be better, I am a bit surprised as I did the same thing 
and got a different answer!

ron