ext4 support

[the-maldridge]

This looks like a pretty amazing library and looks like an ideal package to form the basis of my installer for @void-linux. I'd need ext4 though to do this (and someday I'd love to see support for more exotic filesystems, even it if meant shelling out to their tools.

Do you foresee ext4 landing any time soon?

[deitch]

Thanks @the-maldridge . I will admit that it has been quite a labour of, well, masochism. :-)

void-linux is interesting. I was motivated to start diskfs from my work on linuxkit. There are only 2 places there where we need to exec out to an external program; building filesystems is one of them. These are all bits in a file/on a disk, so I said the 5 most dangerous words any engineer can say: "how hard could it be?"

Do you foresee ext4 landing any time soon?

I got pretty far with ext4. If I am not mistaken, reading works fully. The difficulty is writing, and particularly some of the areas that use tree structures. Rebalancing them (or even figuring out how to build them initially) got bogged down. That led to as switch to immutable filesystems first, since they are much easier to write. Hence iso (which is complete) and squashfs (which is mostly so). I do intend to return to ext4 once squashfs is done.

[CanyonCasa]

Would the gexto package be of any use in helping you along with ext4 support?

[deitch]

It really might, thank you @CanyonCasa . I can look at either integrating it, or just leveraging the few parts that got blocked. MIT and Apache licenses largely are compatible, so that is good.

[deitch]

It is at a state where both squashfs and ext4 are working read but not write. Time to get it completed.

[probonopd]

I'd be highly interested in squashfs read and write, and in zisofs read and write.

[deitch]

I as well @probonopd :-)

Just got to find hours to work on it.

[Mikkelhost]

Hey, i stumbled upon your repo!
I am looking for a way to edit a raspberry pi image using go.
So i was wondering how the ext4 support is coming along? :)
Or maybe you could point me in a direction that could make sense for editing these types of images using scripting

[deitch]

Slowly. 😆

ext4 reading works, you can check out the ext4 branch. Writing was about halfway done last I saw it. I would love to give it a month and finish it up. But real life, as they say. Every now and then, someone needs it for business purposes and invests.

[Mikkelhost]

It is totally fine haha no pressure, we all gotta do what we gotta do!
Played with the library a little yesterday, and found that i could use the existing functionality to write to the boot partition of the raspbian image :D

So just wanna say great job on this man!

[vtolstov]

gentle ping about ext4 support... also question how much money needs to be donated to get read/write support for ext3/ext4 ?

[deitch]

Hi @vtolstov . Can you email men directly avi [at] aptimia [dot] com?

[gaurav-gogia]

Hey @deitch,

I found this library very recently. It looks pretty cool. I think its going to be very helpful to me. My use case doesn't involve any writing so I was going through different issues to see if it supported file systems other than FAT32

Soo, did you have time to implement read-only support for NTFS or EXTn or ExFAT?

Please advise

Thanks!

[deitch]

Soo, did you have time to implement read-only support for NTFS or EXTn or ExFAT?

ext4 remains in process. I think the read-only works, might be able to publish it if I could some time among business work. NTFS has not been done, nor has exFAT. It really is just a question of time. We have a pattern and process in place for getting it done, but it is just long hard work.

very helpful to me. My use case

What are you looking at?

[gaurav-gogia]

We have a pattern and process in place for getting it done, but it is just long hard work.

Understandable

What are you looking at?

I wish to read a disk image, parse it and read all the files/folders inside of it. I don't want to mount that disk image. Also, while I would prefer working on it using GoLang. Similar solution in some other programming language with maybe a better library support is also fine by me