Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: Squashfs released (a highly compressed filesystem)

Padraig Brady
2002-10-30T15:06:18Z

Jesse Pollard wrote:
> On Tuesday 29 October 2002 10:11 pm, Larry McVoy wrote:
>
>>>A r/w compressed filesystem would be darned useful too :)
>>
>>mmap(2) is, err, hard. Not impossible, it means the file system has to
>>support both compressed and uncompressed files, but it's interesting.
>
> You can also think of it as a step toward a hierarchical filesystem with the
> files:
> 1. uncompressed (with uncompressed inode)
> 2. compressed on line (real disk space allocated)
> 3. compressed nearline (only compressed inode on disk, with a
> reference to offline storage)
>
> Obviously this is only for very large filesystems (we have one FS that
> is currently between 100-200 TB in size when you include the migrated
> storage).

I think it's worth referencing e2compr here also,
which is a patch that provides transparent compression
for ext2 (& ext3?). Denis RICHARD (CC'd) is maintaining
the 2.4 implementation. I've version 0.4.42 (against
2.4.16) mirrored here:
http://www.iol.ie/~padraiga/patches/e2compr-0.4.42-patch-2.4.16.gz

Note I've used it without problems (to access filesystems
created with the kernel 2.2 version) here:
http://cvs.bofh.asn.au/e2compr/

Pádraig.