Re: File system compression, not at the block layer

From: Theodore Ts'o
Date: Fri Apr 23 2004 - 12:42:57 EST


On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 05:30:21PM +0000, Miquel van Smoorenburg wrote:
> In article <408951CE.3080908@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> Timothy Miller <miller@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >Well, why not do the compression at the highest layer?
> >[...] doing it transparently and for all files.
>
> http://e2compr.sourceforge.net/

It's been done (see the above URL), but given how cheap disk space has
gotten, and how the speed of CPU has gotten faster much more quickly
than disk access has, many/most people have not be interested in
trading off performance for space. As a result, there are race
conditions in e2compr (which is why it never got merged into
mainline), and there hasn't been sufficient interest to either (a)
forward port e2compr to more recent kernels revisions, or (b) find and
fix the race conditions.

- Ted


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