ati-driver-installer package with lzma compression could save up to 54% space!

[Kano]

I wrote a script to be able to repack (and fix) official ati installer packages. Then I tested different compressions. Here the results:

51213090 ati-driver-installer-8.41.7-x86.x86_64.run
48289029 ati-driver-installer-8.41.7-x86.x86_64.run.bzip2
23317971 ati-driver-installer-8.41.7-x86.x86_64.run.lzma

For bzip2 and lzma max -9 compression was used like it gzip -9 is used in original package. In percentage:

100% ati-driver-installer-8.41.7-x86.x86_64.run
94% ati-driver-installer-8.41.7-x86.x86_64.run.bzip2
46% ati-driver-installer-8.41.7-x86.x86_64.run.lzma

Of course that needs lzma installed on the system or you have to put in a static build of lzma, but download size would be much smaller. lzma is the compression which used by 7zip.

[FunkyRider]

what's the difference in compress/uncompress speed?

7zip's supposed to be a good thing though

[ivanovic]

7z is *damn* slow regarding compressing/uncompressing. It takes a whole lot more time to compress/decompress a 7z file.
Beside this it is a rather new compression format. Due to this I do not trust this format so far since it has not proven to work in all cases, there might be some cases left where a lossless compression ain't working as expected. It takes quite some time until no compression algorithms are widely accepted...

[Kano]

Well compression takes of course much longer (nearly 4 min on X2-3800+), but uncompress is not much slower than gzip - you would not see any difference. The only trick would be getting a lzma or better only the decoder lzmadec into the package. lzmadec static stripped with gzip packed would need around 200 kb extra space only.

[FunkyRider]

but the first thing needs to be made clear is, why is a driver take such a large space... :cool::cool:

[d2kx]

but the first thing needs to be made clear is, why is a driver take such a large space... :cool::cool:

Well, it is big, because fglrx is full of... features, you know.

[Kano]

Very easy: it is multiply times stored it it. 4x for each arch, so 8x in total and gzip just does not "find" enough similaries between those. Also the installer is stored twice.

[yoshi314]

lzma is a fairly good compression algorithm, but it's damn slow to pack something (which is not a problem in fglrx case, since ati does it) and it's not always reliable in its compression ratio. it does a bad job with certain file types (e.g. textual files) and other comression methods are size-comparable much faster.

also most 7zip algorithms use loads of memory to unpack. maybe lzma does not, i don't know.

[FunkyRider]

a lot of features... that's just great :D ....... like no AA/vsync settings in the control panel.... :eek::eek:

[Michael]

a lot of features... that's just great :D ....... like no AA/vsync settings in the control panel.... :eek::eek:

Wait for 8.42....

[FunkyRider]

Michael, kindly to indicate whether AA will still work when AIGLX's enabled?

[Kano]

Basically that thread should not be about any feature of the driver, just about the compression of it...

[ltmon]

Wait for 8.42....

We are dammit, we are ;)

[Kano]

So, now my script is ready for automatic adding a static variant of lzmadec if lzmadec.gz is in the same dir, filesize:

51213090 ati-driver-installer-8.41.7-x86.x86_64.run
23317971 ati-driver-installer-8.41.7-x86.x86_64.run.lzma
23525503 ati-driver-installer-8.41.7-x86.x86_64.run.lzma.static

So the diff is only: 207532 byte. Btw. my script can be used to make a stripped down version too, like only x86 and only Xorg 7.1+ would be:

13294358 ati-driver-installer-8.41.7-x86.x710.run.lzma.static

When you remove all setup files (--buildpkg only then):

11486143 ati-driver-installer-8.41.7-x86.x710.no-setup.run.lzma.static

That would fit nicely on a cd, when you compare it with NVIDIA 32 bit only:

7594280 NVIDIA-Linux-x86-100.14.23-pkg0.run

Not that much bigger...