1 SQUASHFS 3.0 - A squashed read-only filesystem for Linux 2 3 Copyright 2002-2006 Phillip Lougher <phillip@lougher.org.uk> 4 5 Released under the GPL licence (version 2 or later). 6 7Welcome to the first release of Squashfs version 3.0. Squashfs 3.0 has the 8the following improvements to 2.x. 9 10 1. Filesystems are no longer limited to 4 GB. In 11 theory 2^64 or 4 exabytes is now supported. 12 13 2. Files are no longer limited to 4 GB. In theory the maximum 14 file size is 4 exabytes. 15 16 3. Metadata (inode table and directory tables) are no longer 17 restricted to 16 Mbytes. 18 19 4. Hardlinks are now suppported. 20 21 5. Nlink counts are now supported. 22 23 6. Readdir now returns '.' and '..' entries. 24 25 7. Special support for files larger than 256 MB has been added to 26 the Squashfs kernel code for faster read access. 27 28 8. Inode numbers are now stored within the inode rather than being 29 computed from inode location on disk (this is not so much an 30 improvement, but a change forced by the previously listed 31 improvements). 32 33There is a new Unsquashfs utility (in squashfs-tools) than can be used to 34decompress a filesystem without mounting it. 35 36Squashfs 3.0 supports 2.x filesystems. Support for 1.x filesystems 37will be added in the future. 38 391. UNSQUASHFS 40------------- 41 42Unsquashfs has the following options: 43 44SYNTAX: unsquashfs [-ls | -dest] filesystem 45 -version print version, licence and copyright information 46 -info print files as they are unsquashed 47 -ls list filesystem only 48 -dest <pathname> unsquash to <pathname>, default "squashfs-root" 49 50The "-ls" option can be used to list the contents of a filesystem without 51decompressing the filesystem data itself. 52 53The "-info" option forces Unsquashfs to print each file as it is decompressed. 54 55The "-dest" option specifies the directory that is used to decompress 56the filesystem data. If this option is not given then the filesystem is 57decompressed to the directory "squashfs-root" in the current working directory. 58 59Unsquashfs can decompress 3.0 filesystems. Support for 2.x and 1.x 60filesystems will be added in the future. 61