Request for Comments: libarchive, bsdtar

[Brooks Davis]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2004 at 10:22:02PM +0100, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> In message <40059DFB.9000904 at mail.ru>, Vladimir Dozen writes:
> >ehlo.
> >
> >> If you become a bored person requiring entertainment, it might be quite
> >> interesting to create a read-only tarfs for use as a root file system
> >> loaded in an md device.
> >
> >   I'm just curious: is it possible to write a GEOM class to mount
> >   a given tar as a FS in R/O mode (using libarchive, I mean)?
> 
> That would be a filesystem, not a GEOM class.
> 
> And yes it would be.  Part of the trouble is directory searches
> where you need to build some kind of index in order to not have
> to run through sequentially all the time.

For cases where you know you're going to be using the archive as a file
system, you might be able to cheat a bit by creating a special file
containing an efficent index of the contents of the archive.  That would
let you avoid keeping everything in memory and rescanning the disk
constantly.

-- Brooks

-- 
Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
PGP fingerprint 655D 519C 26A7 82E7 2529  9BF0 5D8E 8BE9 F238 1AD4
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arch/attachments/20040114/fe3b2ffb/attachment.bin