[Nix-dev] kmod: gzip/xz support

[Shea Levy]

On 03/27/2012 01:53 PM, Yury G. Kudryashov wrote:
> Shea Levy wrote:
>
>> On 03/27/2012 01:12 PM, Yury G. Kudryashov wrote:
>>> Hi!
>>>
>>> Currently kmod binary links both to libz and liblzma. This means that
>>> these libraries have to be added to the initrd (I already use kmod
>>> instead of module-init-tools).
>>>
>>> On the other hand, our kernel package does not compress modules. I think
>>> that we should
>>> * either drop gzip/xz in kmod,
>>> * or compress kernel modules.
>>>
>>> Which one do you prefer?
>> Any chance you can try both and see the size difference? That is, how
>> much does compressed modules save on the system vs how much do libz and
>> liblzma add to the initrd? Also regardless of the answer we probably
>> don't need both libz and liblzma.
>>
>> Probably the best answer is to abstract some of this stuff into nixos
>> config options (compressModules, compressionType) and, depending on how
> compressModules = "none" | "gz" | "lzma".
>> hard it would be to build kmod locally, have hydra build kmod three ways
>> (no compression, libz, and liblzma).
> The difficult part is: kernel needs `depmod`, thus it depends on kmod. We
> don't want users to rebuild kernel just to use another compression type...

Hmm... Well then I guess the 'all-enabled' kmod does make some good 
sense, but some real numbers on how much is saved by compression and how 
long compression takes might be needed to really say.