DSL Ideas and Suggestions :: wish list for the new version, dsl 5.0

Quote (curaga @ June 12 2008,21:41)

My wishes for the default kernel:
- squashfs
- ramzswap

One thing I like about those forums is how often it helps to discover some tech I didn't know anything about

I understand squashfs is some read-only compressed file system. What are the differences compared to cramfs or cloop? (I hope this isn't a stupid question!??)

It compresses better than either of cloop and cramfs. It's pretty much evolved cramfs, and it has none of cramfs's limitations (8bit gids/uids only, or max uncompressed size of 256mb) nor the biggest flaw in cloop (you have to have enough ram/swap to fit the entire unpacked fs for either packing or unpacking)

Oh, and ramzswap is swap in a compressed ramdisk. So you're trading some cpu time for more ram. Since it's the deflate algorithm, you can get about 24mb of stuff to fit in 16mb of ram.

Quote (curaga @ June 12 2008,12:48)

3:2 compression? So for 64mb actual ram, you get 96mb. For 128mb you get 172mb. That's awesome.

Too bad it needs 2.6.x (.17 according to one report), so only tinycore would be able to use it.

The project's name is actually compcache http://code.google.com/p/compcache/

ramzswap is just the name of the block device it creates.

I believe Puppy uses squashfs for their pup-save file.

Of course you can't just say you will use all your ram for swap, you need to leave some for running apps and the kernel, but using it might prove handy on many machines.

And yes, Puppy has used squashfs a long time, also for their main image. Not sure about 4, haven't tried it.

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