I made a bzip2 bootloader and ramdisk patch, ?useful/not?

Ah. But it looks like you only patched the ramdisk loader, I did the bootloader also. My intention is that it would be used as a replacement for the gzip thoughout, the kernel I have on tomsrtbt 2.0.88 does the bzip2 kernel load and bzip2 ramdisk load, and does not include the gzip code at all.

As for figures-

I have only tested with bzip2 -9, and my patch only supports small (not fast), (remember that I'm coming from a floppy diskette...). I'm aiming for compression then memory then speed, so, I don't have numbers for what bzip2 -1 or fast-RLE would be like. Moreover, the tomsrtbt is loading a 4MB ramdisk from a 1.722 floppy, so I'm not testing memory usage beyond pass/fail on an 8MB machine.

In _my_ configuration, (tomsrtbt 2.0.88), the numbers (to the best accuracy I have, using the current best measure I have performed):

Size:

gzip bzip2 savings

Kernel 862209 831381 30828

Ramdisk    939474   880756      58718
           ______   ______      _____

Total 1801683 1712137 89546

Speed Memory

Gzip Lightning Thimble

Bzip2 Molasses Bathtub

-Tom