SQUASHFS 3.0 - A squashed read-only filesystem for Linux Copyright 2002-2006 Phillip Lougher <phillip@lougher.org.uk> Released under the GPL licence (version 2 or later). Welcome to the first release of Squashfs version 3.0. Squashfs 3.0 has the the following improvements to 2.x. 1. Filesystems are no longer limited to 4 GB. In theory 2^64 or 4 exabytes is now supported. 2. Files are no longer limited to 4 GB. In theory the maximum file size is 4 exabytes. 3. Metadata (inode table and directory tables) are no longer restricted to 16 Mbytes. 4. Hardlinks are now suppported. 5. Nlink counts are now supported. 6. Readdir now returns '.' and '..' entries. 7. Special support for files larger than 256 MB has been added to the Squashfs kernel code for faster read access. 8. Inode numbers are now stored within the inode rather than being computed from inode location on disk (this is not so much an improvement, but a change forced by the previously listed improvements). There is a new Unsquashfs utility (in squashfs-tools) than can be used to decompress a filesystem without mounting it. Squashfs 3.0 supports 2.x filesystems. Support for 1.x filesystems will be added in the future. 1. UNSQUASHFS ------------- Unsquashfs has the following options: SYNTAX: unsquashfs [-ls | -dest] filesystem -version print version, licence and copyright information -info print files as they are unsquashed -ls list filesystem only -dest <pathname> unsquash to <pathname>, default "squashfs-root" The "-ls" option can be used to list the contents of a filesystem without decompressing the filesystem data itself. The "-info" option forces Unsquashfs to print each file as it is decompressed. The "-dest" option specifies the directory that is used to decompress the filesystem data. If this option is not given then the filesystem is decompressed to the directory "squashfs-root" in the current working directory. Unsquashfs can decompress 3.0 filesystems. Support for 2.x and 1.x filesystems will be added in the future.