[Lzip-bug] Lzip patch for linux-4.9.22 released

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

I am pleased to announce the release of a new lzip patch for linux-4.9.22.

This patch adds lzip decompression support to the linux kernel.

The homepage of lzip is at http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip.html

The patch can be downloaded from 
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/lzip/kernel/

Instructions on how to apply the patch can be found at 
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/lzip/kernel/README_linux_lzip_patch

The sha256sum is:
9ae839c95a787fb798808cbe63043d381f34dd0fbd8dd1117ddcf25227c0e016 
linux-4.9.22_lzip-1.diff.lz

Linux already offers a lot of compression formats. Then, why lzip?

Because lzip is the only gzip-like LZMA compressor featuring a 
well-designed format:

   * Lzma-alone is a toy format lacking integrity checking or even a
     proper header.

   * Xz has a complex and not properly designed format[1]. It can
     compress the kernel image a little more than lzip on some
     architectures (about 4% on x86) by using a different binary filter
     for each architecture. But this increase in complexity does not
     improve the decompression time (much less the boot time) compared
     with lzip.

     Also the xz compressor is the only one needing special options to
     compress data for linux, and xz decompression is the only one that
     may fail because of wrong options used at compression time.

     [1] See http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html


Please send bug reports and suggestions to address@hidden


Regards,
Antonio Diaz, lunzip author and maintainer.

--
If you are distributing software in xz format, please consider using 
lzip instead. See http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html and 
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip_benchmark.html#busybox