SquashFS?

[Darko Ilic]

On Friday 21 October 2005 16:18, Michael H. Warfield wrote:
>  So, as far as unionfs goes, it's up to the developers to approach the
> kernel people about inclusion in the upstream sources.  So someone needs
> to push the unionfs developers.

Well, having unionfs included in the kernel would be *great* for live CDs. 

If we could push both unionfs and SquashFS to go upstream, that would improve 
the quality of live CDs dramatically. 

SquashFS would improve performance because it's much faster than currently 
used zisofs, and would allow more packages to be included in the distro since 
it's compression ratio is higher. Higher compression ratio would also result 
in greater performance because smaller files need less time to be transfered 
from the CD to the memory. 

Unionfs would improve the quality of the live CD distributions because it 
won't be necessary to move files that are supposed to be writable to the 
ramfs drive, so all the files would stay in their "original" locations. 
Another thing is that all parts of the file system would be writable which is 
awesome (editing every single file, installing small pieces of software, 
moving files...). It is also important that RAM consumption would be much 
lower since there is no need to transfer all writable files to the RAM, just 
diffs to the changed files.

The main question for me is how to accomplish this. I'm quite new to the whole 
thing, and maybe I wouldn't choose the right approach to the kernel people... 
Is there anybody that is willing to help me with this? An advice would be 
just fine.

Thanks

--
Darko

p.s. I forgot to mention that there is a couple of live CD distributions that 
already use these two modules, and work very well.