This is a collection of lzma programs/patches I wrote :-

Basically it consists of :- 

 1. Kernel patches (2.4/2.6) to use LZMA to compress/decompress the vmlinux,
    ie lzma vmlinuz instead of the gzip version.

 2. Kernel patches (2.4/2.6) to use LZMA to compress/decompress the initrd
    ( together in this patch, it will handle LZMA initramfs too ), 
    ie lzma initrd and lzma initramfs.cpio instead of the gzip version.
    
    Original gzip capability is still intact, ie you can supply initrd
    and initramfs.cpio in either gzip or lzma format. It's upto you.

 3. A light weight utility (lzmacat) to decompress a lzma-compressed file.
    This program adapts it's memory usage based on the file size, ie uses
    less memory for small files irrespective of dictionary size, but will 
    consume memory at most the size of the dictionary for big files.
    
 4. A busybox diff for busybox to include applet lzmacat. This is derived
    from the patch created by Thomas Lundquist <baldrick@castle.hyssing.net>
    ( http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw ).
    

All these require LZMA SDK to work.

1. To download  LZMA SDK, 

    http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html

   Currently it points to 

    http://www.7-zip.org/dl/lzma422.tar.bz2

2. To compile the C++ lzma compressor/decompressor,

    $ mkdir lzma
    $ cd lzma
    $ tar xvjf ../lzma422.tar.bz2
    $ cd SRC/7zip/Compress/LZMA_Alone

    $ dos2unix makefile
  
           or 
 
    $ cat makefile | tr -d '\r' >makefile.tmp;  mv makefile.tmp makefile

    $ make

   To install, 

    $ su
    # cp lzma /bin

   To get help on 'lzma',

    $ lzma

   To compress a file,

    $ lzma e a.file a.lzma

   To uncompress a file,

    $ lzma d a.lzma a.orig

3. To compress initrd using lzma,

    $ gunzip initrd.gz
    $ lzma e initrd initrd.7z -d16

   To be on the safe side, it is important to use -d16 when compressing initrd,
   or else the decompressor might not have enough memory to decode it. You might
   want to try higher dictionary size if your platform has huge memory.
 
4. To patch the kernel source to handle lzma vmlinuz, 

    $ cd /usr/src/linux

    $ patch -p1 < lzma-vmlinuz-2.4.patch
        or
    $ patch -p1 < lzma-vmlinux-2.6.patch

5. To patch the kernel source to handle lzma initrd,

    $ cd /usr/src/linux

    $ patch -p1 < lzma-initrd-2.4.patch
        or
    $ patch -p1 < lzma-initrd-2.6.patch
    
6. To compile the utility program 'lzmacat',

    $ make lzmacat

Ming-Ching Tiew <mctiew@yahoo.com>
30-June-2005