Bill Studenmund wrote:

> [ discussion about a compressing filesystem layer ]
>
> Also, don't forget that most of the programs on the install media are
> cruched into one file. So that will give different access patterns than
> from a file system full of random files.

I wonder if the cheap-n-nasty trick I saw comp.sources.unix or somesuch
years ago where binaries were replaced with shell scripts that contained
compressed images of the real binary and were cached in /tmp or
somewhere might be useful in CF-type root disks.  This would involve
having a reasonalby sized mfs /tmp to store the uncompressed binaries
(how much ram does a iopener have?), but would be a lot less work than
writing a new filesystem :-)

For a quick test on a -current i386:

	wincen:/tmp/xx 53> du
	4649    ./bin
	7726    ./sbin
	12376   .
	wincen:/tmp/xx 54> gzip -r9 .
	wincen:/tmp/xx 55> du
	2421    ./bin
	3891    ./sbin
	6313    .

You'd probably write a stand-alone program to do the decompression,
etc instead of leaving a "normal" /bin/sh, gzip and a handful of other
commands that the orignal script used.

Well, that's it for my hair-brained pre-coffee early Saturday morning
ideas :-)

Simon.