"I'd like to get a first round of review on my AXFS filesystem," began Jared Hulbert, describing his new Advanced XIP File System for Linux. XIP stands for eXecute-In-Place. The new filesystem received quite a bit of positive feedback. Jared offered the following description:

"This is a simple read only compressed filesystem like Squashfs and cramfs. AXFS is special because it also allows for execute-in-place of your applications. It is a major improvement over the cramfs XIP patches that have been floating around for ages. The biggest improvement is in the way AXFS allows for each page to be XIP or not. First, a user collects information about which pages are accessed on a compressed image for each mmap()ed region from /proc/axfs/volume0. That 'profile' is used as an input to the image builder. The resulting image has only the relevant pages uncompressed and XIP. The result is smaller memory sizes and faster launches."

"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," stated Phillip Lougher about the latest release of the compressed read-only Linux filesystem. He noted that he still needed to fix filesystem endianness, then he was going to focus on getting Squashfs into the mainline kernel. New features found in this latest release include:

"1. Maximum block size has been increased to 1Mbyte, and the default block size has been increased to 128 Kbytes. This improves compression.

"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."