[Lzip-bug] Lzip patch for linux 4.18.1 released

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

I am pleased to announce the release of the lzip patch for linux 4.18.1.

Since 2016 I maintain a patch adding lzip decompression support to the 
linux kernel. This includes support for lzip-compressed kernel image, 
initramfs, initrd, modules, and squashfs filesystems. The patch 
implements a linux module named lzip_decompress.

Lzip related components in the kernel
=====================================

The lzip_decompress module in lib/lzip_decompress.c provides a versatile 
lzip decompression function able to do buffer to buffer decompression or 
stream decompression with fill and flush callback functions. The usage 
of the function is documented in include/linux/lzip.h.

For decompressing the kernel image, initramfs, and initrd, there is a 
wrapper function in lib/decompress_lunzip.c providing the same common 
interface as the other decompress_*.c files, which is defined in 
include/linux/decompress/generic.h.

For kernel makefiles, two commands are provided in scripts/Makefile.lib 
for use with $(call if_changed). The kernel image must be compressed 
with $(call if_changed,klzip) which will append a four-byte trailer 
containing the size of the uncompressed data, which is needed by the 
boot code. Other things should be compressed with $(call if_changed,lzip).

Testing
=======

Xlunzip is a test tool for the lzip_decompress module. It is similar to 
lunzip, but it uses the lzip_decompress module as a backend. The xlunzip 
tarball contains a copy of the lzip_decompress module and can be 
compiled and tested without downloading or applying the patch to the 
kernel. The homepage of xlunzip is at 
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xlunzip.html

The patch can be downloaded from
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/lzip/kernel/linux-4.18.1_lzip-2.diff.lz

The sha256sum is:
20ec09d46795768824a20aea3896e46f1ac06827792655a5a7aaec43bf18f301 
linux-4.18.1_lzip-2.diff.lz

Please, test it and report any bugs you find.


Thanks,
Antonio Diaz, lzip author and maintainer.

--
If you are distributing software in xz format, please consider using 
lzip instead. See http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip_benchmark.html#xz1 and 
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html