Comment 113 for bug 1842320

As I've said elsewhere, if we dedup firmware files through symlinks, we can save 10MB in initrds. Compression does not help because the compressors have very small compression windows and cannot see redundancy in practice (this applies to xz to a lesser extent but even for xz there is an improvement to be gained).

I don't know if it will be enough but it could tip us just below some threshold and it's easy to implement. It should also save memory at runtime.

And for reference, there's a working but weird work-around that only touches initramfs.conf, keeps MODULES=most and is reasonably fast. Use 'xz' as the compress program and then add the following on a new line:

  export XZ_OPT=--lzma2=preset=0,dict=16M

(yes, it relies on implementation details of mkinitramfs)