On Tuesday 15 March 2005 10:23 am, Randall R Schulz wrote:
Danny,
On Tuesday 15 March 2005 08:09, Randall R Schulz wrote:
Danny,
...
I was thinking plain old extfs2, but this cramfs thing sounds interesting. What are the implications / requirements for getting it working on an otherwise stock SuSE 9.1 (with all YOU patches, including new kernels, installed)?
It appears cramfs is very limited, it's rather less than a full-featured Linux file system with compression. Evidently, it's actually oriented towards embedded Linux applications like your (Danny's) MP3 player.
For example (from the NOTES file included in the cramfs tools tarball):
Yeah - it's along the lines of squashfs and zisofs - most of those require pre-creating the filesystem (which is the compression stage), and then they can be read from by decompressing on the fly. Reiser4 has a transparent compression plugin, but then you're using Reiser and a journal again. If you were using this thing in a single machine, you could put the journal on a sepaarte device, but then you might as well put the files on that separate device, too. :) I wish there was a transparently compressed filesystem available for Linux that didn't also require a journal. I guess that, depending on your preferred desktop environment, you could use a .tar.gz/bz or .zip file, as KDE and Gnome, IIRC, both have a VFS plugin that'll let you treat those files as folders on the filesystem. I'm not sure if either work by unwrapping the whole file or just the part that's needed. I'm betting that you wouldn't get much of a performance gain there - though, you'd probably get decreased flash life, since the flash card couldn't balance the writes across the disk as well as it normally could. What about just gzipping everything on the card? Many (most?) utilities can directly work with gzipped files now - things like less, man, vim, etc. On my Gentoo desktop that I'm testing with, bzip'd files are transparent to those tools, too. Sadly, the GUI tools largely don't work with either. And zlib is so easy to use... --Danny, probably not a whole lot of help. :)