Talk:Disk compression

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This article currently gives only passing mention to filesystem compression on other operating systems. Much of the article (especially in the ‘How disk compression works’ subsections) is specific to MS-DOS / Windows implementations. This makes me unsure as to how to add information about implementations on other operating systems. Perhaps rename that section title to ‘... in MS-DOS implementations’.

Some relevant articles on Linux implementations include Cramfs, SquashFS, e2compr, zisofs, and block device compressors such as cloop, and possibly a mention of the related common practice of compressing an entire filesystem image when it is intended to be decompressed into a ramdisk or some other medium before being accessed. One could also add a link to executable compression.

Here is some brief information about them as I'm aware of (without checking too much):

cramfs, SquashFS, cloop and presumably zisofs[*1] are only for read-only filesystems.

[*1]: I guess that zisofs is readonly because it's an extension of the ISO 9660 filesystem that's used primarily for read-only media.

Such readonly filesystems are sometimes used in combination with a UnionFS implementation to provide a read-write filesystem. (Ref: SquashFS#Uses.)