[Nix-dev] kmod: gzip/xz support

[Yury G. Kudryashov]

Shea Levy wrote:

> On 03/27/2012 01:12 PM, Yury G. Kudryashov wrote:
>> Hi!
>>
>> Currently kmod binary links both to libz and liblzma. This means that
>> these libraries have to be added to the initrd (I already use kmod
>> instead of module-init-tools).
>>
>> On the other hand, our kernel package does not compress modules. I think
>> that we should
>> * either drop gzip/xz in kmod,
>> * or compress kernel modules.
>>
>> Which one do you prefer?
> 
> Any chance you can try both and see the size difference? That is, how
> much does compressed modules save on the system vs how much do libz and
> liblzma add to the initrd? Also regardless of the answer we probably
> don't need both libz and liblzma.
> 
> Probably the best answer is to abstract some of this stuff into nixos
> config options (compressModules, compressionType) and, depending on how
compressModules = "none" | "gz" | "lzma".
> hard it would be to build kmod locally, have hydra build kmod three ways
> (no compression, libz, and liblzma).
The difficult part is: kernel needs `depmod`, thus it depends on kmod. We 
don't want users to rebuild kernel just to use another compression type...
-- 
Yury G. Kudryashov,
mailto: urkud at mccme.ru