Creating filesystems with compression
squashfs is a heavy-compression based read-only filesystem that is capable of compressing 2 to 3 GB of data onto a 700 MB file. If you have ever used a Linux LiveCD (or LiveUSB), they are built using squashfs . These CDs make use of a read-only compressed filesystem which keeps the root filesystem on a compressed file. It can be loopback mounted and loads a complete Linux environment. Thus, when some files are required by processes, they are decompressed and loaded onto the RAM and used.
squashfs can be useful when it is required to keep files heavily compressed and to access a few of them without extracting all the files. This is because completely extracting a large compressed archive takes a long time. However, ...
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