From: Frank T Lofaro <fl0p+@andrew.cmu.edu> Subject: Re: New feature for the filesystems. What do you think ? Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1993 01:35:57 -0400
It sounds like a useful idea for those pressed on diskspace, and seems
worth implementing. Some problems that need to be addressed:
1. Speed of access.
2. Demand-paging. It'll probably be really hard to get this to work with it.
3. Backwards compatibility. Anyone out there know if there are any spare
fields or bits (seems like this idea only needs to steal one) in the
inode structure of the current filesystems?
4. How to have the kernel actually decompress? Exec an outside program?
(Hard to do, much kernel internals hacking, memory foo to deal with)
Work with a daemon? (What do you do if the daemon dies, etc? How does
the daemon start, and talk to the kernel?) Build gunzip into the kernel?
(Might be difficult, but then, the kernel does decompress itself, so
maybe we can steal that code.....)
This does seem a lot better than trying to compress the whole FS (not
quite as efficient for space, but probably a hell of a lot easier to
implement).
Anyway, good luck with this idea. It has been mentioned before, but this
time there is some proposed way of handling some of the implementation
details; it seems quite feasible. I don't know enough about filesystems
to know how easy/hard this will be tho...