Toby Corkindale <toby@dryft.net> writes:
I ran a quick test using (non-zfs) equivalents of various compression tools, over a 2.0G filesystem image. (ie. hoping that represents a fair variety of binary+text files)
xz 253s 103M
That is substantially better compression ratio than what I see when compressing root filesystems, e.g. Exportable Squashfs 4.0 filesystem, xz compressed, data block size 1MiB [debian wheezy minimal] Filesystem size 50114.51 Kbytes (48.94 Mbytes) 22.45% of uncompressed filesystem size (223224.17 Kbytes) [debian jessie grumpy sysadmin desktop] Filesystem size 436156.57 Kbytes (425.93 Mbytes) 27.39% of uncompressed filesystem size (1592218.93 Kbytes) [debian wheezy XFCE luser desktop] Filesystem size 1009350.84 Kbytes (985.69 Mbytes) 37.00% of uncompressed filesystem size (2727952.22 Kbytes) Were you compressing a .cpio, .tar or what? Or was it simply a 2GiB ext filesystem that contained (maybe a lot) less than 2GiB of actual data? BTW there is "pxz" and "pixz" which can use >1 core; xz from xz-utils is still single-threaded.