DwarFS Files

The main features of this release are new licensing conditions and significantly smaller binaries.

New Licensing Conditions

Instead of being all GPL-3.0 like all the previous releases, this release changes the license of a large fraction of the DwarFS code to MIT. All tools and libraries that only read DwarFS images are now MIT-licensed. Everything else (e.g. mkdwarfs) is still GPL-3.0 for the time being.

Significantly reduced binary size

By moving the build pipeline to Alpine Linux and through some major refactoring, the size of the release binaries has been reduced significantly.

There's now also an additional binary called dwarfs-fuse-extract that combines the functionality of the FUSE driver dwarfs and dwarfsextract in a single, extremely small binary:

The main use case for this binary is single-file application image runtimes (e.g. uruntime). This binary doesn't have built-in manual pages or support for the performance monitor. It also only supports zstd and lzma compression.

Bugfixes

• Build release binaries against an up-to-date libfuse. Fixes github [#252].

• Changes for compatibility with Boost.Process v2.

Features

• Re-licensed all libraries required for reading DwarFS images under the MIT license. The source of all tools that just read DwarFS images (i.e. everything except for mkdwarfs) are also under the MIT license now. Everything else is still GPL-3.0. Addresses github [#255].

• Significantly reduced binary size in the static release builds. This is the result of refactoring code that unconditionally pulled in code-heavy dependencies such as libcrypto, as well as optimizing the build pipeline (e.g. building dependencies with only the necessary set of features) and turning on link time optimization.

• A new kind of "universal" binary dwarfs-fuse-extract is part of the release now. This combines the FUSE driver (dwarfs) and dwarfsextract into a single binary, but does not include the mkdwarfs and dwarfsck tools that are also part of the regular universal binary. dwarfs-fuse-extract is much smaller than the regular universal binary and especially suitable to AppImage-like applications.

• New hotness categorizer in mkdwarfs that allows a list of "hot" files to be stored in distinct file system blocks.

• New explicit ordering mode in mkdwarfs that allows files to be ordered accoring to the order in a given list file.

• dwarfs now shows the version of the FUSE library used.

• New dwarfs options preload_all and preload_category to populate the block cache immediately after mounting.

• New dwarfs option analysis_file that can be used for profiling and as input to mkdwarfs new hotness categorizer and explicit ordering mode.

• New dwarfs option block_allocator that allows the user to switch from a malloc-based block allocator to an mmap-based one. This can help with returning memory back to the system if the blocks are evicted from the cache.

Full Changelog: https://github.com/mhx/dwarfs/compare/v0.11.3...v0.12.0