[OpenIndiana-discuss] Will OpenIndiana switch to SquashFS?

[Peter Tribble]

On Sat, Jan 9, 2021 at 6:37 AM Hung Nguyen Gia via openindiana-discuss <
openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org> wrote:

> Most Linux distributions now employing SquashFS for their live system so
> they are blazing fast even though being run from a slow USB 2.0 stick. I'm
> posting this mail on one of such live system. I found OpenIndiana is using
> another technology:
> https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2012/10/those-strange-zlib-files.html
>
> Does this technology comparable to SquashFS? And if SquashFS is better, is
> there any plan to switch to SquashFS?
>

The illumos distributions have alway used a compressed filesystem for the
live image.
There's no difference to squashfs in that respect - we're just normally
compressing the
whole image. There's no benefit to changing to a different scheme that's
essentially
identical.

We do actually have a direct equivalent to squashfs already - dcfs. I've
not seen it used
much, although it was used on SPARC to compress the files in the boot
archive. (On x86,
the bootloader can read a compressed boot archive, so you don't need it
there.)

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/