Fedora 34 plans to reduce installation media size

Although Fedora 33 has not yet been released, a new feature proposal for Fedora 34 has come. So far, one of the planned changes for Fedora 34 to be released next spring is to reduce the size of the installation media through enhanced compression.

The current plan is to increase the compression rate of the SquashFS file system on the installation media. Bohdan Khomutskyi’s plan is to consider using XZ compression, setting the block size to 1MB, and not using the BCJ filter.

[compression]

bcj = no

args = -b 1M -Xdict-size 1M -no-recovery

As a result, the compression will result in +6.51% or, in real terms, +24.94s additional installation time, but for the Fedora installation media, it can save approximately 142 MiB of space. In addition, due to plans to make changes to Fedora’s Anaconda installer, the installation time should eventually not go backward too much.

Reducing the ISO image file by 100+ MiB not only helps users who install Fedora to reduce bandwidth consumption, but also helps reduce the bandwidth/image size consumption of Fedora projects, reduce distribution costs, and reduce CPU usage during construction.