Ubuntu 19.10 uses LZ4 compression to make boot faster

In the official Canonical blog post released recently, Colin Ian King, an Ubuntu engineer from the Kernel team, introduced some improvements in the Ubuntu 19.10 operating system startup. The Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine) operating system is scheduled to be officially released on October 17. The blog post indicates that a faster compression/decompression algorithm has been found through the efforts of the past few months.

Canonical’s Colin Ian King wrote, “ In compression size, GZIP produces the smallest compressed kernel size, followed by LZO (~16% larger) and LZ4 (~25% larger). With decompression time, LZ4 is over 7 times faster than GZIP, and LZO being ~1.25 times faster then GZIP on x86… Even with slow spinning media and a slow CPU, the longer load time of the LZ4 kernel is overcome by the far faster decompression time. As media gets faster, the load time difference between GZIP, LZ4 and LZO diminishes and the decompression time becomes the dominant speed factor with LZ4 the clear winner.“