From: danielsi@cs.utexas.edu (Daniel Aaron Supernaw-Issen) Subject: Re: New feature for the filesystems. What do you think ? Date: 14 Apr 1993 01:20:46 -0500
about paging and random update:
it seems to me that the solution is simple. don't compress the file,
compress on the block level. You KNOW that when uncompressing a block how
big it will be. You have to read in the whole block anyways the issue of how
big it is on disk is orthogonal to everything else. prepend the block with
a byte identifying what compression alg (if any was used) and all is taken
care of. I'm currently working on implementing exactly this on a lfs. In
this case, a number of different compression algorithms are used and the one
with the best compression (including no compression) wins. the only real
change to the surrounding lfs code was that the head position had to be
byte indexed rather than block indexed. no biggie.
Daniel Supernaw-Issen
danielsi@cs.utexas.edu
Linux or Die!