Arch Linux

olive

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2008-06-22

Posts: 1,490

Transparent filesystem compression

I wonder if there is a filesystem that supports transparent compression. Lots of files are stored compressed (man pages, for example). It seems it would be much more efficient to have a compression at the file system level so that we could just use normal files. No more zgrep, no more library to access compressed file in the editor (emacs support that for example) and the possibility to compress exactly what  we like, included less used executables. Why is this feature not more widespread. I am not a specialist in file systems, but it seems not very difficult to implement.

Slithery

Administrator

From: Norfolk, UK

Registered: 2013-12-01

Posts: 5,776

Re: Transparent filesystem compression

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Btrfs#Compression
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ZFS#General_2

Last edited by Slithery (2016-12-07 14:26:55)

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kokoko3k

Member

Registered: 2008-11-14

Posts: 2,394

Re: Transparent filesystem compression

Probably not what you are looking for, because it is not intended to replace the whole filesystem:
https://github.com/tex/fusecompress

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jjb2016

Member

From: Oxfordshire

Registered: 2016-02-29

Posts: 73

Re: Transparent filesystem compression

ZFS supports transparent compression and there are Arch Wiki guides explaining how to install Arch on ZFS.  Unfortunately ZFS support does not come with the standard arch linux kernel and has to be installed as a kernel module.  See the ZFS section in the wiki.