squashfs
On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, Herbert Xu wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 12:24:49PM -0600, Drew Scott Daniels wrote:
...
> > Where would I file a wishlist bug to get squashfs included in
> > kernel-images? It's value is discussed in
> > http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2003/debian-boot-200302/msg00412.html
> > There are three or four separate threads about squashfs in the archives
> > of debian-boot for Feb 2003.
>
> I have followed those threads and I don't see any reason why we must have
> it. However, any Debian developper can package it as a kernel-patch
> package.
I don't see a reason why it *must* be included, but in
http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2003/debian-boot-200302/msg00449.html
Glenn McGrath <bug1@optushome.com.au> says: "The comparisons to cramfs
does favour squashfs for lowmem installs."
I can see situations where it must be used. I may be facing such a
situation myself with a lowmem install on an old system of mine, but I may
be able to pull things off with 4MB and no system reserved blocks.
I would like to have an easy way of creating a debian install that uses
squashfs. Whether this means having an official kernel-patch package and
distributing an unofficial udeb or any other method. To be honest, I'd
just like someone else to do it, and I'm unsure as to how much value it
has.
Squashfs' usefulness over cramfs seems to be in situations where cramfs
images are too large for storage on media. Since the advantage is only 13%
in the given example, there would not be a huge number of cases, but it is
significant. 13% could be very useful to the installer team, and I would
like the option somehow made available.
Perhaps Koopnix may see some advantage to using squashfs as the CD
filesystem. If someone demonstrates that squashfs is useful enough to
create an official debian kernel-image udeb/deb then they would likely be
the first maintainer and it would be made official.
Useful enough should be qualified. I don't know what kind of limitations
on filesystem size or memory requirements have currently been reached. Can
anyone point to things that are wanted in, but not in Debian's images?
Could squashfs reduce the number of disks used to install Debian? I doubt
that squashfs would be any more useful than gzip for the base images.
Drew Daniels
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