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Last Updated on Friday, 09 May 2008 06:28 Written by Administrator Tuesday, 29 April 2008 14:30

compFUSEd is a compressed overlay filesystem that supports both transparent READ and WRITE operations. Since I did not find other compressing filesystems for Linux right [*] I wrote this thing. Thanks to FUSE and using compFUSEd you can add compression to your existing filesystem in under 5 minutes.

 

 

As of compFUSEd GISMO files are split in chunks of fixed size. Each chunk is compressed before being written to disk. This reduce the memory needs and improves random access within large compressed files.

Overlay? Files are compressed an decompressed on the fly but the actual storage is done in the directory of an underlying fs. This underlying fs takes care of space allocation, fragmention, etc... So no need to reformat your filesystem.

Trying compFUSEd is easy; chose directory to use as acompressed mount and give it a go. Don't like it, copy your files to another place and unmount. No (re)formatting no kernel patches needed.

Yeah, but does it work? Better and better with every release. But it is still work in progress. Right now (5 November 2005) the Linx kernel compiled fine with 'make clean; make -j2; ' running compFUSEd in multi-threading mode

[*] There still is ext2comp, but ext2 is getting a bit old and the patches are NOT compatible with the newer ext3. Reiser4 was not out yet. I did not know gzipfs exists. And all the other FUSE based solution were not online at that time either.