Somewhat famously, tar format is so bad, when kernel needed an compression format for initrd, they went with cpio: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/file

Somewhat famously, tar format is so bad, when kernel needed an compression format for initrd, they went with cpio: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/ramfs-rootfs-initramfs.txt https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/ramfs-r... Quote: "tar is ugly as hell and not going to be supported on the kernel side"