nrv2b, lzma and more savings

Wed Sep 13 21:42:15 EDT 2006

Hi,

Ron has a small patch to LinuxBIOS which will enable us to
move to nrv2b now. http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/70

While it has been said in the past that we should not
switch to nrv2b as intermediate step, I feel that it
would be worthwhile given the current state.

Pros:
* Saves 22k compressed payload size now
* Works for me(tm)
* People who want to fit more into the ROM do not have
  to wait until lzma support is finished
* The switch to lzma becomes a smaller step because
  we can reuse most of the nrv2b paths with lzma
* The buildrom changes are small: 2 lines in Config.mk

Cons:
* We would have to switch again once lzma is ready
* Not widely tested yet

This leaves another question to be decided: Do we want
to keep compressing VSA and kernel/initrd separately or
do we combine the two? And if we combine them, how can
we separate them? Is integrating the VSA into the ELF
image an option? While it probably doesn't matter now,
it is possible that this gives us an additional 10-40k
once we move to lzma.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel
-- 
http://www.hailfinger.org/