SquashFS Tools 4.5 Released To Celebrate 20 Years Of SquashFS

While SquashFS wasn't mainlined in the Linux kernel until 2009, this compressed read-only file-system has been in development for twenty years now with initially being a set of out-of-tree kernel patches. SquashFS has been instrumental to many Linux distributions for their Live DVD/USB environments and other use-cases where needing a general purpose read-only file-system with low overhead.

In marking two decades of SquashFS, the SquashFS Tools 4.5 release was made on Thursday. Phillip Lougher continues overseeing the work and this release not only is significant for marking two decades but also in bringing new features to the tool-set.

SquashFS Tools 4.5 introduces the notion of "actions" for mksquashfs, a new command sqfstar to create a SquashFS image from a Tar archive, a new option to throttle the amount of CPU and I/O that mksquashfs uses, new pseudo file definitions, the new command sqfscat to output the contents of files to the standard output, and a wide variety of new options to the different existing tools/commands, bug fixes, and a variety of other enhancements.

The lengthy list of changes to find with SquashFS Tools 4.5 as well as more details on the features like mysquashfs actions can be found via the release announcement.