EROFS-Utils 1.5 Released With ZTailPacking, FSCK Extraction

EROFS-Utils 1.5 has been released as the set of user-space utilities for the EROFS Linux read-only file-system that is increasingly popular with Android/embedded use-cases and growing container usage.

EROFS-Utils 1.5 adds support to fsck.erofs for file-system extraction, the user-space support for ZTailPacking inline feature on compressed files, the dump.erofs utility can now support listing directories, new APIs added, support for using mtime to have more control over file-system timestamps, and changing the utilities licensing to GPL-2.0+ or Apache-2.0 dual license.

For the mkfs.erofs command, the "ztailpacking" option can now be added to enable the ZTailPacking feature that works with Linux 5.17 kernels and later. Enabling this option will pack the tail part "pcluster" of compressed files into the meta-data to help in saving more disk space and tail part I/O.

EROFS' FSCK with the new "--extract=" option allows for extracting given paths for directories / regular files / symlinks.

In the EROFS-Utils 1.5 release announcement is also an update on the EROFS road-map. Some of the plans for this Linux read-only file-system include transitioning over to using folios, LZ4 range dictionary support, EROFS over FSCACHE is being pursued, multi-threaded MKFS and FSCK support, and various embedded improvements.