20

May
2011

Testing of SquashFS in Linux 2.6.38

In the past, I've sponsored squashfs-lzma patches in order to support 7-zip's lzma compression in squashfs. But even squashfs itself was not included in Linux kernel, so it was not possible to 'mount' Slax modules in any distro other than Slax.

The situation has changed now. SquashFS is included in mainline and XZ (lzma2) support is included in kernel as well. So I've compiled mksquashfs tool with xz support and tested the compression ratio.

I hoped to get some exciting results, however there is no excitement at all. That doesn't mean it would be bad, not at all! It's just compressing 'the same' like before :)

Using dictionary size of 250k I got the very same size (differece in about 100 kbytes) from the previously used lzma patches. The compression ratio is the same, it's not worse than before, that's good ;) And the best part? You can mount that filesystem on any distro with recent kernel.

User comments
novah 2011-05-20 13:47

This is good, so do we have some news about the slax7?
And what you think about porteus?

Nick 2011-05-21 03:36

Yeah, when are we goona get the chance to hop back on the slax train again.

artpsiholog 2011-05-21 07:31

Heh, yea... A lot of people in the world (and in Russia particularly) wait, when a new version of Slax will be ready. Hope, you make it :)

unnnammed 2011-06-03 07:29

Why we can't use symlinks in ram that points to the programs on hard disk or usb disk? My idea is to create a simple sh script which compiles programs from sources on the hd or usb and creates symlinks off all files.
That's way we can save greate amount off free memory. I think it would be useful.