With the growing number of devices requiring loadable firmware/microcode at run-time and Linux continuing to simply support a lot more hardware, the size of /lib/firmware has ballooned in recent years while now for the upcoming Linux 5.3 kernel release is the ability to compress these firmware files for fairly significant space savings…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 5.3 Picks Up Support For Compressed Firmware Files – Measurable Storage Savings