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How do you put the files in it if it's read-only? To me it seems such an fs should be immutable-first rather than read-only, i.e. let you create (by copying fr

How do you put the files in it if it's read-only? To me it seems such an fs should be immutable-first rather than read-only, i.e. let you create (by copying from another fs) files which just can't be changed (can be moved though) ever after. And such would be what I actually need as I have a lot of big and relatively redundant files which aren't meant to change (e.g. video files, picture originals, distro and backup disk images etc.).

Cloudef 3y ago
It's meant as squashfs replacement. That is image used for rootfs on live-boot system with overlayfs on top for writable tempfs for example. But I imagine this being useful for many embedded applications in general where you need to save space.
claudex 3y ago
It's in the man page[1], you put the file at the filesystem creation: $ mkdwarfs -i /path/dir -o image.dwarfs [1]: https://github.com/mhx/dwarfs/blob/main/doc/mkdwarfs.md https://github.com/mhx/dwarfs/blob/main/doc/mkdwarfs.md
thesnide 3y ago
Append only files might be enough to be fair. And still very useful. As then, you can dedup per block, even with a sliding window. Nicest is that you can do it fully asynchronously, so real time appends are not slowed down.
- Neikius 3y ago
  Then you add delete and you have a cow fs. Which are many. Some with deduplicarion built in.
pdimitar 3y ago
It's read-only after you create the image. And then you can use overlayfs on top of it as others mentioned -- useful for playing with live Linux distributions or embedded systems where you never want to change the root bootable image except when you are actually updating the firmware. ...Or, in the author's case, when you have hundreds of directories that have only small differences compared to each other. As other posters in the bigger thread mentioned, this is also very useful for big arcade game collections.
ssl-3 3y ago
> How do you put the files in it if it's read-only? The same way we [used to] use specialized software tools to assemble an ISO 9660 image with our data, and then burn that image to a [single-session] write-once optical disk like CD-R.

Cloudef 3y ago

It's meant as squashfs replacement. That is image used for rootfs on live-boot system with overlayfs on top for writable tempfs for example. But I imagine this being useful for many embedded applications in general where you need to save space.

claudex 3y ago

It's in the man page[1], you put the file at the filesystem creation: $ mkdwarfs -i /path/dir -o image.dwarfs [1]: https://github.com/mhx/dwarfs/blob/main/doc/mkdwarfs.md https://github.com/mhx/dwarfs/blob/main/doc/mkdwarfs.md

thesnide 3y ago

Append only files might be enough to be fair. And still very useful. As then, you can dedup per block, even with a sliding window. Nicest is that you can do it fully asynchronously, so real time appends are not slowed down.

Neikius 3y ago
Then you add delete and you have a cow fs. Which are many. Some with deduplicarion built in.

pdimitar 3y ago

It's read-only after you create the image. And then you can use overlayfs on top of it as others mentioned -- useful for playing with live Linux distributions or embedded systems where you never want to change the root bootable image except when you are actually updating the firmware. ...Or, in the author's case, when you have hundreds of directories that have only small differences compared to each other. As other posters in the bigger thread mentioned, this is also very useful for big arcade game collections.

ssl-3 3y ago

> How do you put the files in it if it's read-only? The same way we [used to] use specialized software tools to assemble an ISO 9660 image with our data, and then burn that image to a [single-session] write-once optical disk like CD-R.