[Gllug] Reiserfs gotchas?

[Jim Bailey]

On Thu, May 09, 2002 at 01:21:14PM +0100, Matthew Kirkwood wrote:
> On 9 May 2002, Stephen Harker wrote:
> 
> > > > reiserfs module from as its too big to build into the kernel statically
> > >
> > > Why is it too big?
> [..]
> 
> > Well depending on how much stuff you have in the kernel, it might not
> > fit. The size issue is not how big the kernel is when running and
> > fully loaded with modules but how big the actual base kernel image
> > (/boot/vmlinuz) is because there is an upper limit (I've forgotten how
> > big) above which it won't boot (or lilo cant boot it I can't remember
> > which). Thats why you do a make bzImage because the kernel is bzip2
> > compressed in order to keep the file size down.
> 
> Wrong.  bzImage kernels are still just gzip compressed.  The
> "b" stands for "big" -- it affects only the way the kernel is
> loaded, not its size.  The only reason that regular zImage
> kernels are still available is that the bzImage ones don't
> boot on some older machines with really buggy BIOSes.

I thought that bzImage used the Burrows-Wheeler compression algorithm
and Huffman coding similar to the bzip2 utility.  Spot who has been reading the man page. ;-)

Even if I am wrong I still have no idea who Burrows, Wheeler and Huffman
are or how there stuff works but bzip2 is a nice tool takes longer to do
the job but you get a better compression rate over standard .gz format
archives.

Peace Jim

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