On Thu, Mar 23, 2000 at 03:15:20PM -0500, Jon Lindgren wrote:

( directly executing gzipped executables ...)
> ... is a pretty slick feature, and it doesn't _seem_ like it would be
> that hard to do, either.  This feature would be great for those of us with
> small disks; might it even improve performance over NFS rooted boxes?

I doubt it. Formerly, you needed to read 1 block when you wanted to page in
block N of the executable. Now, you'll have to read in about 0.45*N blocks,
as gzip is a stream cipher.

> It also allows us to fit more userland onto the "system on a floppy" type of
> setups (for simple routers, etc...).

At least on i386, we do this already. That is, the boot loader gunzips the
kernel (if it is gzipped), and the kernel inludes a memory disk image of the
root partition. Is better than gzipping individual files, as it gzips the
meta data, too. 

Regards,
	-is