[OpenIndiana-discuss] Hipster 2020.10 text installer ISO Wow!!!!

[cretin1997]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Friday, March 5, 2021 2:15 PM, Toomas Soome <tsoome at me.com> wrote:
>
> squashfs for linux is GPL, if you want it, you need to write it from scratch. We are already using compressed filesystem images on usb/iso, so squashfs does not add any new value.
>
> rgds,
> toomas

Do you think we should merge the two images into just one compressed image so basically we eliminate the current split root scheme? SquashFS is also just one big image contains the whole file system. The current SquashFS image on my live Linux's size is about 3.2G and the performance still good, the memory consumed is normal, I confirm it's consumed not any much memory than the 1.7G SquashFS image.

If SquashFS compressed much better and scale much better and also used not much more memory than our current scheme do you think it's worth to do a CDDL re-implementation of it for the Illumos kernel?

SquashFS with lz4 reduces the image size alot. Recent SquashFS also supports Zstd. I know we don't have lz4 yet, only xz. As this article stated, xz compressed better but make the performance suffers: https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2012/10/those-strange-zlib-files.html

So IMHO, if you don't want to use Linux technology, we should stop using split root images and merge the two images into just one and we should add lz4 and Zstd to lofiadm so we could use these algorithm to compress our image. This can't compare to SquashFS's efficiency, but at least same same.