On Wednesday 20 October 2004 02:01, Leendert Meyer wrote:
On Wednesday 20 October 2004 01:13, Carlos E. R. wrote:
The Tuesday 2004-10-19 at 12:56 -0500, Danny Sauer wrote:
Does anyone know offhand if any of the commonly supported filesystems support dynamic compression? I was looking at the size of my maildirs today, and thought to myself "text generally compresses well"...
Me too...
I guess I could archive stuff to a cramfs or squashfs periodically, as that'd give me a readable directory structure with compression, but I'd really like to trade some CPU time for some disk space on a couple of machines. If Ms can manage to get individually compressed files into NTFS, surely *someone* has gotten around to doing so under Linux. Right?
Ha! Half wrong...
I'll head off to google, but figured that someone here might know of something and maybe even have experience with it.
Ok, I know that ext2 was thought, at some point, to get it. But I'm unable to find the man page that mentioned this time ago - it was "man attr", I think. It has not being implemented.
Then, it is possible to create compressed cdroms and dvds: the kernel can read them on the fly, transparently. But of course, it is read-only.
Pity.
It seems that most developpers think that HD space is cheap. That may be so, but using less space is even cheaper. It does not make much sense to me to waste space...
On the 9.1 live CD, cloop.img is compressed. A kernelmodule, cloop.ko, is used to uncompress on the fly, like:
insmod cloop.ko file=cloop.img && mount -r -t iso9660 /dev/cloop mount_point
Found something with 'gg:cloop kernel':
http://dag.wieers.com/packages/kernel-module-cloop/kernel-module-cloop.spec
So Dag Wieers has an rpm package for a cloop kernel module. A bit further searching on http://rpm.pbone.net/, I learn that Mandrake has a cloop-utils package. From the src rpm, I discover that Klaus Knopper is the maintainer of the cloop tarball. See http://developer.linuxtag.net/knoppix/sources/cloop*
Just discovered that the cloop module is part of the kotd kernel in the projects directory. And it is also in kernel-default-2.6.8-16.i586.rpm, that was part of the SuSE 9.1.42 (9.2 beta). Those rpms, including source, are still available on e.g.: ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/suse/suse/i386/update/9.1.42/ I'm thinking about trying to install those on my 9.1 system tomorrow... ;) <whisper> Seems that 9.2 can handle compressed filesystems? Would be nice! </whisper> Cheers, Leen