[Prex-devel] Compressed ROM file system

[David G. <dg...@co...>]

So I appear to be terminally stuck with my vfork() issue --- I think 
there's at least one thing wrong that I'm doing plus at least one thing 
wrong that Prex is doing. The next stage is to try and duplicate the 
issue on GBA and right now I don't have the energy to build the wacky 
gcc variant it needs.

However: in the process of working on the Cybiko, I ran out of ROM space 
(it's only got 256kB). To work round this I implemented a compressed ROM 
file system using zlib's puff lightweight inflator. This compresses each 
512 byte block individually so the compression ratio's not brilliant, 
but it's still achieving about 2:1 and supports true random access. puff 
is about 2kB of code and is under a pretty much identical license to Prex.

So is this useful to anybody? Shall I try and clean up the patch, and if 
so, what should I do with it (the Prex mailing list doesn't seem to 
accept patches)?

One complication is that it needs a custom program to create the 
compressed file system image, and right now the Prex build system 
doesn't support these --- I have a hack that builds and runs it as 
required. This needs to be cleaned up.

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