Squash Fs

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Description

"Squash FS" is the name of a compressed read-only filesystem for Linux. There are a number of such file systems available for Linux, including ROMFS, CRAMFS and SquashFS.

Rationale

A compressed file system is interesting in embedded systems for reducing the overall size (in flash) of the Linux system. Squash FS is reported to have better compression capabilities than CRAMFS, which is a very popular

Resources

Projects

The Squash fs home page is at: Squash FS

Specifications

There are no specifications on this technology.

Downloads

Patch

Utility programs

The squashfs file release contains a README, the squashfs patch files, and the squashfs-tools directory (mksquashfs). Please see the INSTALL file for install instructions.

How To Use

See the Squash FS Howto:

Sample Results

Here are brief summaries for 2 large file systems, saved using a variety of file system types.

This information was provided by Phillip Lougher.

Ubuntu liveCD compression results

   ext3 uncompressed size      1.4 GB
   ISO9660 uncompressed size   1.3 GB
   Zisofs compressed size      589.81 MB
   Cloop compressed size       471.89 MB
   Squashfs2.0 compressed size 448.58 MB
   Squashfs2.1 compressed size 448.58 MB

Damn Small Linux liveCD compression results

   ext3 uncompressed size      126 MB
   CRAMFS compressed size      52.19 MB
   Squashfs2.0 compressed size 46.52 MB
   Squashfs2.1 compressed size 46.52 MB

File System Performance

There is performance data for these file systems on the page SquashFsComparisons.

lzma data comparison

Here is some information that was posted recently on the squashfsmailing list by Oleg Vdovikin:

> # du -s target
> 7836    target
> # ls -l target.*
> -rw-r--r--  1 root     root 2842788 Aug 27 17:54 target.cramfs
> -rwx------  1 root     root 2449408 Jan 26 13:19 target.sqshfs
> -rwx------  1 root     root 2060288 Jan 26 13:21 target.lzmafs
> 
>     So, lzma for this filesystem gives 84% of original size. For bigger
> filesystem I've got 82%.

Future Work/Action Items

Here is a list of things that could be worked on for this feature:

  • there was a report in August, 2004 of problems with squashfs on PPC. see here (at bottom of page)
  • there was a suggestion to use LZMA compression for version 3.0 of squashfs - see here

Notes on compression

From: John Richard Moser <nigele...@comcast.net>
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 18:20:11 +0200
Subject: Re: Compressed filesystems: Better compression?

Matti Aarnio wrote:
| Compression algorithms are a bit tough to be used in a random access
| smallish blocks environments. In long streams where you can use megabytes
| worth of buffer spaces there is no problem is achieving good performance.
| But do try to do that in an environment where your maximum block size
| is, say: 4 kB, and you have to start afresh at every block boundary.

Yes of course. I've seen the compressed page cache patch do this and
get fair peformance (10-20%), though on double size blocks (8KiB) it
manages almost twice as good (20-50%, averaged around 30% IIRC). Not
great, but not bad.

On compressed filesystems you can work with 64k or 128k blocks.
Somewhere around 32-64k is usually optimal; you're not going to see
great improvements using 1M blocks instead of 512k blocks.

| Whatever algorithms you use, there will always be data sequences that
| are of maximum entropy, and won't compress. Rather they will be
| presented in streams as is with a few bytes long wrappers around
| them.

Yes, an intelligent algorithm decides that if the underlying compression
algorithm used produces no results, it just marks the block as
uncompressed and stores it as such. ZLIB does this if the block gets
bigger. LZMA might not; but higher level intrinsics (block headers)
could handle that easy (as you said).