Re: Import of XZ

[David Brownlee <abs%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On 4 August 2010 17:38, Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost> 
wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 04, 2010 at 12:33:09PM -0400, der Mouse wrote:
>> But even if so, do we want people starting to play with NetBSD to have
>> their introduction be the unpleasant discovery that they can't even
>> uncompress things?
>
> It's not so far being unable to uncompress things. It is likely to be
> more or less dog slow. That depends on what backward references are used
> etc. Well, dog slow relative to the normal speed, not to something
> modern.

It may make some sense to pick xz vs gz defaults based on cpu
architecture (I suspect vax & m68k being the obvious low memory & cpu
candidates), or we may find that xz on -1 may prove a reasonable
setting (apparently around 1MB memory usage for decompression) for
memory shy platforms, or even using -M to specify memory usage.

xz is in pkgsrc, would someone with a low cpu/memory be willing to run
a few tests to determine how expensive it is for them?

(Obviously I think moving the default across to xz is a wonderful idea :)