*BSD News Article 19304


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From: niemidc@oasis.gtefsd.com (David C. Niemi)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development
Subject: Re: Compressing file system ?
Date: 9 Aug 1993 15:01:13 GMT
Organization: GTE Federal Systems Division
Lines: 19
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <245orp$e2f@europa.eng.gtefsd.com>
References: <vp.744825872@news.forth.gr>
Reply-To: niemidc@oasis.gtefsd.com
NNTP-Posting-Host: hengist.lab.oasis.gtegsc.com

In article 744825872@news.forth.gr, vp@nemesis.csi.forth.gr (Vassilis Prevelakis) writes:
[...]
>So how do we deal with block level access?
>	The idea that comes to my mind is that you break the file into
>blocks and compress each block individually.  I would suppose that
>you'd lose some efficiency in the compression (esp. if you have to
>copy your compression table in the beginning of each block).  Maybe
>having larger blocks would reduce the overheads.

That is what I suggested (not an original idea by me either, I suspect).

I don't see why such a feature would cause much kernel bloat, as some have
suggested, provided it is kept optional.  And performance is less critical
than it would be on a normal filesystem, as you would normally want to use
uncompressed file systems for performance-critical files.
---
David C. Niemi: David.Niemi@oasis.gtegsc.com