SMP Version of tar

[Tim Kientzle]

On Oct 7, 2012, at 10:00 AM, Wojciech Puchar wrote:

>> I would be willing to work on a SMP version of tar (initially just gzip or something).
>> 
>> I don't have the best experience in compression, and how to multi-thread it, but I think I would be able to learn and help out.
> 
> gzip cannot - it is single stream.

gunzip commutes with cat, so gzip
compression can be multi-threaded
by compressing separate blocks and
concatenating the result.

For proof, look at Mark Adler's pigz
program, which does exactly this.

GZip decompression is admittedly trickier.


> bzip2 - no idea

bzip2 is block oriented and can be multi-threaded for both compression and decompression.


Tim