[U-Boot-Users] bzip2 very slow

[Aras Vaichas]

I recently started using bzip2 to compress my kernel, I made the necessary
changes in u-boot-1.1.2 to include bzip2 and increase the malloc size to 4MB.
The decompression for the bzip2 image is over 10 times slower compared to the
gzip image.

version: U-Boot-1.1.2 - 5338372 Feb 25 10:47 u-boot-1.1.2.tar.bz2
cpu: at91rm9200

from at91rm9200dk.h:
#define CONFIG_BZIP2     1
#define  CFG_MALLOC_LEN  (0x410000)

Here is a comparison of gzip vs bzip2 on the same 2.6.x kernel:

== gzip ==
$ gzip -v9 linux.bin
$ /usr/local/uboot/mkimage -A arm -O linux -C gzip -a 0x20008000 -e 0x20008000
-d linux.bin.gz uImage-2.6-dk

compressed file size: 877kB
decompression time:  about 3 seconds

== bzip2 ==
$ bzip2 --best linux.bin
$ /usr/local/uboot/mkimage -A arm -O linux -C bzip2 -a 0x20008000 -e 0x20008000
-d linux.bin.bz2 uImage-2.6-dk

compressed file size: 813kB
decompression time: about 30 seconds


bzip2 is taking over 10 times longer to decompress for a 64K smaller file size.
Is this normal?

regards,

Aras Vaichas