Linux Today: Linux News On Internet Time.

More on LinuxToday

AllLinuxDevicesPR: NOW embedded linux gets smaller

Jan 30, 2001, 05:21 (1 Talkback[s])



"The "Compressed Block Device" CBD, a GPL driver, is a demand decompression block device that shrinks file system partitions 2.5 to 3 times. Imagine getting linux 2.4, glibc, Xwindows, Mozilla in to a 16M flash! The features include writable file system, partition management, multiple base block devices, and known file system at reset time. The patch "cbd-2.4.0-2.patch.bz2" contains the kernel patch and applications to use the CBD. The offical device major is 102 accessed using /dev/cbd/a[1-15]."

"When using the CBD only the files being used are decompressed and in memory, this means that memory is not wasted on unused programs and data. The big difference between CBD and any other compressed file system is, that the whole file system is compressed and is writable. The writes never get to the physical device. So every time the system boots, the file system is in always the same state."

Press Release