Ubuntu 18.10 Will Boot Faster, Thanks to LZ4 Initramfs Compression

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  • Post Updated: April 3, 2024

If you plan on upgrading to the forthcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system this spring, chances are your computer will boot a little faster thanks to the implementation of a stronger compression algorithm for the initial ramdisk.

Canonical’s Balint Reczey recently proposed the implementation of LZ4 compression to Ubuntu’s initramfs (initial ramdisk) instead of the older gzip compression used in previous releases of the wildly used operating system. LZ4 is a lossless data compression algorithm that offers extremely fast compression and decompression speed.

During some initial tests on an old laptop, the developer reports that the initramfs extraction time decreased from approximately 1.2 seconds to about 0.24 seconds. The creation of the initramfs also received a speed boost of 2-3 seconds, decreasing from roughly 24 seconds to about 21 seconds, despite of slightly… (read more)

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