Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Thu, 1 Nov 2001 13:07:21 -0700 | From | Andreas Dilger <> | Subject | Re: writing a plugin for reiserfs compression |
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On Nov 01, 2001 18:14 +0100, Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk wrote: > Novell NetWare has a feature I really like. It's a file compression > feature they've been having since version 4.0 (or 4.10) of the OS.
Yes, there is a patch for ext2 that does this as well.
> New attributes must be added somehow. 'ls' and 'find' and perhaps other > files must be modified to take advantage of this. The compression job can > be a simple script with something like > > find . -type f ! --compressed ! --dont-compress / -exec fcomp {} \; > > (and check can't compress and force compression).
There already exists a patch for reiserfs which uses the same interface to file attributes that ext2 and ext3 use.
Also, ext2 already has a "compressed", "do not compress", and "dirty" attributes. They are currently not all user modifyable for ext2 filesystems via chattr/lsattr, but that doesn't mean they cannot be on reiserfs.
> There must be a way to access the compressed files directly to make > backups more efficient - backing up already compressed files's a good > thing.
Yes, there is also such an attribute for "raw" access I think.
Making the user-space interface and tools as compatible as possible is a good thing, IMHO, just like "ls", "cp", etc all work regardless of the underlying filesystem.
As a note to whoever at namesys created the reiserfs patch to add the "notail" flag (overloading the "nodump" flag). I would much rather that a new "notail" flag be allocated for this. I will contact Ted Ted Ts'o to get a flag assigned. This will avoid any problems in the future, and may also be useful at some time for ext2.
Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas Dilger http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/ http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/
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