On Sun, Jan 19, 2025 at 03:37:27PM +0100, Gerhard Wiesinger wrote: > > Are there any plans to include transparent compression with ext4 (especially > with zstd)? I'm not aware of anyone in the ext4 deveopment commuity working on something like this. Fully transparent compression is challenging, since supporting random writes into a compressed file is tricky. There are solutions (for example, the Stac patent which resulted in Microsoft to pay $120 million dollars), but even ignoring the intellectual property issues, they tend to compromise the efficiency of the compression. More to the point, given how cheap byte storage tends to be (dollars per IOPS tend to be far more of a constraint than dollars per GB), it's unclear what the business case would be for any company to fund development work in this area, when the cost of a slightly large HDD or SSD is going to be far cheaper than the necessary software engineering investrment needed, even for a hyperscaler cloud company (and even there, it's unclear that transparent compression is really needed). What is the business and/or technical problem which you are trying to solve? Cheers, - Ted
