On Wed, 12 Mar 2003, Andrew Cooks wrote:
My next step is to recompile everything on my boot disk, using ulibc. Then there should be enough space to include a compression program on the boot disks, without using higher densities. I expect this should make quite a difference as well, seeing as the cpu is now free to do this kind of thing. I'm just not sure whether it's really possible to compress data fast enough. Gzip is not fast enough on the hardware I have. It would have to be faster than 95Mb/s to be of benefit in this situation.
I doubt that compression will give you any improvement. With compression, the CPU and the memory subsystem become the bottlenecks quite quickly. In my own experience, with compression there are simply to many memory copy operations [1].
- Felix
[1] http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~rauch/index.html#CCPE2002