using bzip2 to compress man-pages

Craig Boston craig at xfoil.gank.org
Mon Sep 26 10:53:26 PDT 2005


On Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 02:59:17PM +0100, Brian Candler wrote:
> However I have another suggestion. For USB pen drives, if you don't mind
> your /usr filesystem being read-only then you can get a big benefit from
> using geom_uzip. I've just tried it on the manpages:

geom_uzip is great.  It works wonderfully on my Soekris router/firewall:

ad0: 122MB <SanDisk SDCFB-128 HDB 2.06> at ata0-master PIO4
GEOM_LABEL: Label for provider ad0s1a is ufs/skroot40374.
GEOM_LABEL: Label for provider ad0s2a is ufs/skroot42030.
GEOM_LABEL: Label for provider ad0s3d is ufs/skconfig.
Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/ufs/skroot42030
md0.uzip: 8192 x 16384 blocks
GEOM_LABEL: Label for provider md0.uzip is ufs/skusr.

# ls -l /skusr.uzip 
-r--------  1 root  wheel  22729728 Sep 15 22:40 /skusr.uzip
(gets mdconfig'd early in the boot process -- I have a bootstrap rc that
does the job of figuring out which partition is root, setting up md
devices, etc)

# df
Filesystem           1K-blocks  Used Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ufs/skroot42030     58439 33372 22146    60%    /
devfs                        1     1     0   100%    /dev
/dev/md1                  7662   796  6254    11%    /etc
/dev/ufs/skusr          130263 48529 75221    39%    /usr
/dev/ufs/skconfig         7910   844  6434    12%    /config
/dev/md2                 31470   212 28742     1%    /var
/dev/md3                 19566    12 17990     0%    /tmp
/dev/md4                 31470    34 28920     0%    /home

> I've never tried booting from a geom_uzip filesystem, but I don't see why it
> shouldn't work :-)

It should work in theory, though your kernel (and geom_uzip.ko if it's
not compiled in!) must of course be loaded from an uncompressed
filesystem.

Craig


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