| Abstract: | Data compression techniques have long been assisting in making effective use of disk, network and other resources. Most compression utilities require explicit user action for compressing and decompressing of file data. However, there are some systems in which compression and decompression of file data is done transparently by the operating system. A compressed file requires fewer sectors for storage on the disk. Hence, incorporating data compression techniques into a file system gives the advantage of a larger effective disk space. At the same time, the additional time needed for compression and decompression of file data gets compensated for to a large extent by the time gained because of fewer disk accesses. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a file system for the Linux kernel, with the feature of on‐the‐fly data compression and decompression in a fashion that is transparent to the user. We also present some experimental results which show that the performance of our file system is comparable to that of Ext2fs, the native file system for Linux. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
