lzop not widely used (was: XZ embedded bug unpacking linux-3.8.tar.xz)

Jody Bruchon jody at jodybruchon.com
Thu Feb 28 17:36:59 UTC 2013


 > From: Harald Becker <ralda at gmx.de>
 > And what about lzop? It is another compressor not very widely used.

Actually, I use lzop extensively in my company. It is hands down the 
fastest compression algorithm available in BusyBox in both directions, 
and when you are more concerned with performance than compression ratio 
(but still want decent compression) lzop is a fantastic tool. It's the 
only compressor that is fast enough to squeeze additional bandwidth out 
of network links (because compression on even a slower modern PC is 
faster than the speed of a gigabit ethernet connection). Piping a stream 
through lzop (especially with the -1 switch) is practically free in 
computational terms, and nets a fair compression ratio.

I can't be the only person who uses lzop in such a manner. Plus, on 
embedded systems, the overhead is minimal and the RAM requirement to use 
lzop is tiny (gzip is a beast by comparison), so it fits in very well 
with the spirit of BusyBox.


More information about the busybox mailing list