Bug 1180236

Summary: (Enhancement) Support ZSTD compressed kernel, ramdisk, initramfs and firmware on kernel 5.10 or greater
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE Tumbleweed Reporter: Ryan Bach <romulasry>
Component: KernelAssignee: openSUSE Kernel Bugs <kernel-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED MOVED QA Contact: E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity: Normal    
Priority: P5 - None CC: jslaby, mkubecek, tiwai
Version: Current   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: openSUSE Tumbleweed   
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Description Ryan Bach 2020-12-19 23:06:56 UTC 
Kernel 5.9 supports all but firmware
Don't know if kernel 5.10 supports firmware but I ready that it would have it

This is more of an enhancement than a bug but I think this should be here IMHO. Thanks in advance.
Comment 1 Takashi Iwai 2020-12-20 08:50:36 UTC 
The firmware supports only XZ compression, and openSUSE stable/master branch already enabled the ZSTD initrd support.  The rest is rather the change in dracut.

The kernel compression itself has been kept in GZ for simplicity.

The module compression is done in another way than the kernel config, and it's very unlikely we switch to zstd for now, as it needs to touch quite many other places (obs-pesign, rpm-config, dracut and suse-module-tools, as well as other user-space stuff like yast2-sound and such checking the module files).

So, at most, a possible low-hanging fruit is the kernel compression itself, but I'm not sure whether it's 100% safe or it's worth.
Comment 2 Takashi Iwai 2021-01-21 13:13:13 UTC 
BTW, for the initrd, you can simply override the dracut set up locally.  The TW kernel already supports the zstd initrd.

If we want to switch the default setup of initrd, it should be discussed rather with wider audience.  Please post to opensuse-kernel ML.