Hi all,
I have a wonder I would like to raise, in the hope that someone has an
insight. Knoppix invented a special loopback device called "cloop". This
is a compressed loopback device, which means that you can connect an
standard file system (say, ISO-9660 cdrom), and it will be compressed
and then decompressed on access. When you load a Knoppix filesystem, the
entire filesystem is placed on the CD in a cloop/iso format, and
decompressed on the fly upon demand.
Linux, however, also supports compressed file systems. The most known of
those is cramfs, but there are also others (better), such as squashfs.
The questions is - why is cloop better? What's the difference between
compressing at the block level and compressing at the filesystem level.
Is there any CD related performance difference that causes one to be
better than the other for certain uses?
For the sake of this discussion I'm assuming that both cases offer the
same functionality. I.e. - it's obvious that with cloop I can use any
filesystem I want, but I'm assuming that if I didn't use cramfs, I would
use ISO-9660, which offers very similar functionality. I'm also assuming
that I am not bothered by cramfs's limitations of 8 bit UIDs (or am
using squashfs, which doesn't suffer from those).
Thanks,
Shachar
--
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting ltd.
http://www.lingnu.com/
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