Thank you for your answer. Great! And yes, ext4 works when the system is up and running, also with 64-bit kernel.
>> To use it for running Knoppix from,
>Not in most cases. The /init script is not used anymore after
>installation on harddisk. If you want to run Knoppix in the cloop
>version from an USB flashdisk, like created in flash-knoppix, then your
>proposed change would indeed make it possible to detect ext4 as ext4.
You seem to assume we do an installation to harddisk. Well, we don't, many of us. And we would rather avoid it if at all possible!
I assume that, with poor man's installs to harddisk, we run Knoppix exactly like we would from USB-media.
And, with USB3, running directly from USB harddisks has also become much more of a viable option in many cases. External SSD disk with USB3 runs fairly fast. So, as far as I understand, the /init script will still be essential in these use cases.
In my recent experience, there is little to gain and much more to lose by doing ordinary HD installs. Ordinarily, I'm working on several different machines, and just dropping the Knoppix files to a disk partition, or running from USB harddisk, is the most flexible way to work for me. Even after installing several large programs, like Vmware Workstation, Oracle XE and R with a large selection of packages, the remastered cloop image fits into a FAT32 file (purging some games etc.), and the sqashfs image is even a tiny bit smaller, for some reason. Of course I would like you to drop some games and include scientific software like R, but remastering is necessary in any case, and really no big hassle. We have, too, the added benefit of working with (mostly) updated package versions. (My last 6.4.4 remastering was done end of May.)
I also find it efficient to have a sharp distinction between personal and system setup files, in a 4GB persistent store, and the "rest", which I mount on /store. Which may be a partition, or a loop-mounted image on an NTFS or Unix partition. This way, I have a really portable form of Linux, with no installation needed, only copying the Knoppix system files and eventually /store around. Booting the whole thing from USB is really no big deal. The only element I have not tested so far, is using a huge loop-mounted file on NTFS rw (/store) But loop-mounting knoppix-data.img on NTFS seems to work very well (I'm running off such a case right now) - so I think it should work.
As I see it, the main performance limitation is not at all in using cloop/squashfs now, but in the lack of a pure 64-bits version of Knoppix. I can't install 64-bits Vmware Workstation or 64-bits R, but I have a feeling that this limitation won't last long - at worst, we have to would have to recompile all the packages 64-bits and remaster once more, or am I very wrong in this?
Cheers
Trond