debiandog's quickremaster for mx-linux

[Stevo]

credit where credit is due, eh?
IIRC, it was bled who "enlightened" us to the availability + benefit of lz4 mksquashfs option.
Don't trust memory, use the forum search (query: lz4, show:topics). Yep, earliest mention of lz4 in the forum was a topic started by @bled

That's correct. I didn't know at that time that lz4 was so fast (but obviously not that good at compression), don't think we needed to change anything to make it work in mx-snapshot there's a compression option in mx-snapshot.conf

Is there a way to create a snapshot with lz4,
and then increase the compression of the iso
with a pass of another algorithm

I don't know, but won't you lose the speed light CPU utilization benefit (also compressing already compressed file is usually less efficient than compressing a flat file)

I could see the use case if a standard multithreaded xz-compressed snapshot makes your machine overheat, but you recompress the lz4 ISO using a single thread.

So, if anyone like richb hung on to their 3 GB lz4 snapshot, or has 90 seconds to create another one, how about doing a compression experiment? I do know that the standard snapshot ISO will compress a little when zipped, to about 99.3%.

[richb]

@@Stevo

I could see the use case if a standard multithreaded xz-compressed snapshot makes your machine overheat, but you recompress the lz4 ISO using a single thread.

So, if anyone like richb hung on to their 3 GB lz4 snapshot, or has 90 seconds to create another one, how about doing a compression experiment? I do know that the standard snapshot ISO will compress a little when zipped, to about 99.3%.

I still have it and can do it.

[richb]

So, if anyone like richb hung on to their 3 GB lz4 snapshot, or has 90 seconds to create another one, how about doing a compression experiment? I do know that the standard snapshot ISO will compress a little when zipped, to about 99.3%.

Used gzip:

Original iso 3.1 GB
Zipped file: 2.6 GB and 4 minutes to compress
CPu on Quad Core AMD processor averaged 26%

Unzip
About 1 minute

[Richard]

Interesting.
I'll try it.

The T430 tends to stabilize at 102°C
regardless the parameters. When Adrian first mentioned the "-processors 2" parameter it reduced temperature during snapshot about 10°C.

But after, I think after 17 or 17.1, the temps were back to 102°C. Seems like that is controlled by the CPU?

[Stevo]

Interesting.
I'll try it.

The T430 tends to stabilize at 102°C
regardless the parameters. When Adrian first mentioned the "-processors 2" parameter it reduced temperature during snapshot about 10°C.

But after, I think after 17 or 17.1, the temps were back to 102°C. Seems like that is controlled by the CPU?

More like the ACPI in the "BIOS", plus how good your cooling solution is at the moment. That was one of the things we looked at in choosing the laptop I'm using to build packages, which puts similar 100% stress on the CPU for long periods for many package builds.

[Richard]

More like the ACPI in the "BIOS", plus how good your cooling solution is at the moment. That was one of the things we looked at in choosing the laptop I'm using to build packages, which puts similar 100% stress on the CPU for long periods for many package builds.

Came across the thermald tool which is supposed to push better cooling? Anyway.
I installed and snapshot with "mksq_opt=-comp lz4". Took about 4 minutes, temps about 77°C and ISO was 5.273 GB.
Running to compress as *.tgz but that's really not going to be very usable, it seems to me. (it crashed the compressor just now. :(
Will try again with xz and "mksq_opt=-comp xz -processors 1" and again as gz with all commented out (I think)

102°C for 10 or 12 minutes is probably not too bad for this IBM derivative.
I have/had (gave it away) an old IBM ThinkCentre that ran MX 14, 15, 16 & 17 at 100°C for years? Maybe it was lying?

[Richard]

The clear winner for me in my test for snapshot compression is "gz".
The snapshot config file says, comment out the parameter to only use "gz".

Code: Select all

; Comment out below to use gz compression. Faster, but iso size is bigger.
; To make resulting iso even smaller use "-comp xz -b 262144"
#mksq_opt=-comp xz -processors 2 

Did that and got a winner! The iso of MX18b1x64_Continuum-181207-2.iso
took nearly an hour to generate and is only 3.818 GB with max temp of 87°C.

I can live with that and spare the whip on the CPU. :)

[Adrian]

One hours? Was that "faster"?

[Richard]

No, it was just less hot. :)

But I have found a better way.

Thermald allows using xz compression
and 2 cores while keeping temps at
87°C compared to 102°C without it,
on the T430.

Note: and the same temperatures with 4 threads.
It does slow the system down. Looking for a way to turn off Thermald except when running MX Snapshot.

[richb]

I ran another snapshot after adding number of packages:

snapshot creation:
2:32
6.3 Gb
max cpu 70%
lz4 compression, 4 processors, includes md5 and sha

I did not monitor temperature as the AMD reports temperatures in an odd fashion. It is a reference temperature not the actual temperature.