LZO
LZO is an ultra-fast compression library by Markus Oberhumer with extremely fast decompression and a small code footprint, widely used in embedded systems and boot images.
Purpose
It provides fast lossless compression where decompression speed is critical, such as kernel boot and embedded systems.
Mechanism
It is an LZ77 variant using minimal match encoding and a fixed alternative to Huffman coding, optimized so that decoding is a pure copy loop. The ratio is below gzip, but decompression is several times faster.
Use cases
- Linux kernel initramfs
- Embedded firmware
- Real-time decompression scenarios