Information About

Squashfs
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free special purpose file systems
   
compression file systems
   
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Squashfs is intended for general read-only file system use, for archival use (i.e. in cases where a Tar file may be used), and in constrained Block Device / Memory Systems (e.g. Embedded System s) where low overhead is needed.


OVERVIEW

  • Data, inodes and directories are compressed.

  • Squashfs stores full uid/gids (32 Bit s), and file creation time.

  • Files up to 16 EiB ( 2^64 Byte s) are theoretically supported. Filesystems can be up to 2^64 bytes.

  • Inode and directory data are highly compacted, and packed on byte boundaries. Each compressed inode is on average 8 bytes in length (the exact length varies on file type, i.e. regular file, directory, symbolic link, and block/char device inodes have different sizes).

  • Squashfs can use block sizes up to 64K (the default size is 64K). Using 64K blocks achieves greater compression ratios than the normal 4K block size.

  • File duplicates are detected and removed.

  • Both big and little Endian architectures are supported. The mksquashfs program can generate filesystems for different endian architectures for cases where the host byte ordering is different to the target. This is useful for embedded systems.



USES


SquashFS is used by the Finnix LiveCD Linux Distribution .
The Helix forensics LiveCD also makes use of SquashFS. It is also combined with an UnionFS such as Aufs to provide a read-write environment for live linux distributions. This takes advantage of both the SquashFS's high speed compression abilities with the ability to drastically alter the distribution while running it off of a cd. One distribution that uses this combo is slax and its derivatives such as the Backtrack LiveCD as well as Debian Live.


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