Huawei Restarts Work On Developing A New EROFS Linux User-Space Utility

Last year introduced in the Linux 4.19 kernel was a new EROFS file-system developed by Huawei that they designed to be used as a modern, read-only Linux file-system. After originally publishing the user-space bits last year, they are now re-working their utilities.

EROFS has had a rather interesting history... Initially when the kernel bits were merged there wasn't even the user-space bits published for creating the EROFS file-system with the "mkfs" code. The EROFS kernel driver code came out at the end of May and then in November was the EROFS user-space utility code to be able to create such a file-system.

Huawei has now apparently restarted their effort on that user-space code. The erofs-utils Git repository has been wiped and restarted as of this week.

The repository now indicates that the new erofs-utils uses a "completely new framework" that is "still buggy and under development." Meanwhile the old erofs-utils code is still available via their development branch if wanting to build an EROFS image.