Hi, I'm pleased to announce another release of Squashfs. This is the 22nd release in just over five years. Squashfs 3.3 has lots of nice improvements, both to the filesystem itself (bigger blocks and sparse files), but also to the Squashfs-tools Mksquashfs and Unsquashfs. The next stage after this release is to fix the one remaining blocking issue (filesystem endianness), and then try to get Squashfs mainlined into the Linux kernel again. The list of changes from the change-log are as follows: 1. Filesystem improvements: 1.1. Maximum block size has been increased to 1Mbyte, and the default block size has been increased to 128 Kbytes. This improves compression. 1.2. Sparse files are now supported. Sparse files are files which have large areas of unallocated data commonly called holes. These files are now detected by Squashfs and stored more efficiently. This improves compression and read performance for sparse files. 2. Mksquashfs improvements: 2.1. Exclude files have been extended to use wildcard pattern matching and regular expressions. Support has also been added for non-anchored excludes, which means it is now possible to specify excludes which match anywhere in the filesystem (i.e. leaf files), rather than always having to specify exclude files starting from the root directory (anchored excludes). 2.2. Recovery files are now created when appending to existing Squashfs filesystems. This allows the original filesystem to be recovered if Mksquashfs aborts unexpectedly (i.e. power failure). 3. Unsquashfs improvements: 3.1. Multiple extract files can now be specified on the command line, and the files/directories to be extracted can now also be given in a file. 3.2. Extract files have been extended to use wildcard pattern matching and regular expressions. 3.3. Filename printing has been enhanced and Unquashfs can now display filenames with file attributes ('ls -l' style output). 3.4. A -stat option has been added which displays the filesystem superblock information. 3.5. Unsquashfs now supports 1.x filesystems. 4. Miscellaneous improvements/bug fixes: 4.1. Squashfs kernel code improved to use SetPageError in squashfs_readpage() if I/O error occurs. 4.2. Fixed Squashfs kernel code bug preventing file seeking beyond 2GB. 4.3. Mksquashfs now detects file size changes between first phase directory scan and second phase filesystem create. Regards Phillip Lougher - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html