> Since the kernel already supports bz2 compression with bzImage, I'm
No. bzImage has *NOTHING* to do with bzip2.
bzImage stands for "big zImage". It is just a form of gzipped-Image that
is bigger than 640K. The kernel has NO support for bzip2. I think I can
add it, but it is from scratch.
> surprised the kernel doesn't already support bzip2 for ramdisks. Wouldn't
> the kernel-gang be interested in such a patch? After all, if you are
> interested in a compressed filesystem, why not go for the gold and use bzip2
> from the start.
I doubt there is much interest in this. It will make booting slower and
take more memory, with little enough space savings that most users would
not care. And it would require having bzip2 to build a kernel.
I looked at it, it doesn't look too hard, and there is one other person
who has done some of this also, but for 2.2.x. It is true that most
standard distribution kernels won't work with tomsrtbt, because they won't
have minix compiled in, but they in fact are usually *smaller*, not
bigger, because they use more stuff as modules, that I compile in directly
because it takes less space linked into the kernel than on the floppy as
modules.
-Tom
