3 This is wimlib version 1.8.3-BETA (September 2015). wimlib is a C library for
4 creating, modifying, extracting, and mounting files in the Windows Imaging
5 Format (WIM files). wimlib and its command-line frontend 'wimlib-imagex'
6 provide a free and cross-platform alternative to Microsoft's WIMGAPI, ImageX,
11 To install wimlib and wimlib-imagex on UNIX-like systems, you can compile from
12 source (e.g. './configure && make && sudo make install'). Alternatively, check
13 if a package has already been prepared for your operating system. Example files
14 for Debian and RPM packaging are in the debian/ and rpm/ directories.
16 To install wimlib and wimlib-imagex on Windows, just download and extract the
17 ZIP file containing the latest binaries. See README.WINDOWS for more details.
19 All official wimlib releases are available from http://wimlib.net.
23 A Windows Imaging (WIM) file is an archive designed primarily for archiving
24 Windows filesystems. However, it can be used on other platforms as well, with
25 some limitations. Like some other archive formats such as ZIP, files in WIM
26 archives may be compressed. WIM archives support multiple compression formats,
27 including LZX, XPRESS, and LZMS. All these formats are supported by wimlib.
29 A WIM archive contains one or more "images", each of which is a logically
30 independent directory tree. Each image has a 1-based index and usually a name.
32 WIM archives provide data deduplication at the level of full file contents. In
33 other words, each unique "file contents" is only stored once in the archive,
34 regardless of how many files have that contents across all images.
36 A WIM archive may be either stand-alone or split into multiple parts.
38 An update of the WIM format --- first added by Microsoft for Windows 8 ---
39 supports solid-mode compression. This refers to files being compressed together
40 (e.g. as in a .tar.xz or .7z archive) rather than separately (e.g. as in a .zip
41 archive). This usually produces a much better compression ratio. Solid
42 archives are sometimes called "ESD files" by Microsoft and may have the ".esd"
43 file extension rather than ".wim". They are supported in wimlib since v1.6.0.
47 wimlib itself is a C library, and it provides a documented public API (See:
48 http://wimlib.net/apidoc) for other programs to use. However, it is also
49 distributed with a command-line program called "wimlib-imagex" that uses this
50 library to implement an imaging tool similar to Microsoft's ImageX.
51 wimlib-imagex supports almost all the capabilities of Microsoft's ImageX as well
52 as additional capabilities. wimlib-imagex works on both UNIX-like systems and
53 Windows, although some features differ between the platforms.
55 Run `wimlib-imagex' with no arguments to see an overview of the available
56 commands and their syntax. For additional documentation:
58 * If you have installed wimlib-imagex on a UNIX-like system, you will find
59 further documentation in the man pages; run `man wimlib-imagex' to get
62 * If you have downloaded the Windows binary distribution, you will find the
63 documentation for wimlib-imagex in PDF format in the "doc" directory,
64 ready for viewing with any PDF viewer. Please note that although the PDF
65 files are converted from UNIX-style "man pages", they do document
66 Windows-specific behavior when appropriate.
70 wimlib (and wimlib-imagex) can create XPRESS, LZX, or LZMS compressed WIM files.
71 wimlib's compression codecs usually outperform and outcompress their Microsoft
72 equivalents. Although results will vary depending on the data being compressed,
73 the table below shows results for a common use case: creating an x86 Windows PE
74 image ("boot.wim"). Each row shows the compression type, the size of the
75 resulting WIM file in bytes, and the time it took to create the file. When
76 possible, the results with the Microsoft equivalent are included.
78 =============================================================================
79 | Compression || wimlib (v1.8.3) | WIMGAPI (Windows 10) |
80 =============================================================================
81 | None [1] || 361,314,224 in 2.7s | 361,315,338 in 3.0s |
82 | XPRESS [2] || 137,954,729 in 3.0s | 140,457,081 in 6.4s |
83 | XPRESS (slow) [3] || 135,147,054 in 8.0s | N/A |
84 | LZX (quick) [4] || 130,098,933 in 3.3s | N/A |
85 | LZX (normal) [5] || 126,310,241 in 9.9s | 127,293,110 in 18.5s |
86 | LZX (slow) [6] || 125,884,919 in 17.4s | N/A |
87 | LZMS (non-solid) [7] || 116,150,698 in 23.4s | N/A |
88 | LZMS (solid) [8] || 88,108,326 in 55.6s | 88,771,800 in 90.9s |
89 | "WIMBoot" [9] || 166,892,801 in 3.0s | 169,108,689 in 8.9s |
90 | "WIMBoot" (slow) [10] || 165,004,333 in 7.8s | N/A |
91 =============================================================================
94 [1] '--compress=none' for wimlib-imagex; '/compress:none' for DISM.
96 [2] '--compress=XPRESS' for wimlib-imagex; '/compress:fast' for DISM.
97 Compression chunk size defaults to 32768 bytes in both cases.
99 [3] '--compress=XPRESS:80' for wimlib-imagex; no known equivalent for DISM.
100 Compression chunk size defaults to 32768 bytes.
102 [4] '--compress=LZX:20' for wimlib-imagex; no known equivalent for DISM.
103 Compression chunk size defaults to 32768 bytes.
105 [5] '--compress=LZX' or '--compress=LZX:50' or no option for wimlib-imagex;
106 '/compress:maximum' for DISM.
107 Compression chunk size defaults to 32768 bytes in both cases.
109 [6] '--compress=LZX:100' for wimlib-imagex; no known equivalent for DISM.
110 Compression chunk size defaults to 32768 bytes.
112 [7] '--compress=LZMS' for wimlib-imagex; no known equivalent for DISM.
113 Compression chunk size defaults to 131072 bytes.
115 [8] '--solid' for wimlib-imagex. Should be '/compress:recovery' for DISM,
116 but only works for /Export-Image, not /Capture-Image. Compression chunk
117 size in solid resources defaults to 67108864 bytes in both cases.
119 [9] '--wimboot' for wimlib-imagex; '/wimboot' for DISM.
120 This is really XPRESS compression with 4096 byte chunks, so the same as
121 '--compress=XPRESS --chunk-size=4096'.
123 [10] '--wimboot --compress=XPRESS:80' for wimlib-imagex;
124 no known equivalent for DISM.
125 Same format as [9], but trying harder to get a good compression ratio.
127 Note: wimlib-imagex's --compress option also accepts the "fast", "maximum", and
128 "recovery" aliases for XPRESS, LZX, and LZMS, respectively.
133 - Windows 10 virtual machine running on Linux with VT-x
134 - 4 CPUs and 4 GiB memory given to virtual machine
135 - SSD-backed virtual disk
136 - All tests done with page cache warmed
138 The compression ratio provided by wimlib is also competitive with commonly used
139 archive formats. Below are file sizes that result when the Canterbury corpus is
140 compressed with wimlib (v1.8.3), WIMGAPI (Windows 8.1), and some other
143 =====================================================
144 | Format | Size (bytes) |
145 =====================================================
147 | WIM (WIMGAPI, None) | 2,814,254 |
148 | WIM (wimlib, None) | 2,814,216 |
149 | WIM (WIMGAPI, XPRESS) | 825,536 |
150 | WIM (wimlib, XPRESS) | 787,356 |
151 | tar.gz (gzip, default) | 738,796 |
152 | ZIP (Info-ZIP, default) | 735,334 |
153 | tar.gz (gzip, -9) | 733,971 |
154 | ZIP (Info-ZIP, -9) | 732,297 |
155 | WIM (wimlib, LZX quick) | 686,420 |
156 | WIM (WIMGAPI, LZX) | 651,866 |
157 | WIM (wimlib, LZX normal) | 623,718 |
158 | WIM (wimlib, LZX slow) | 619,382 |
159 | WIM (wimlib, LZMS non-solid) | 581,046 |
160 | tar.bz2 (bzip, default) | 565,008 |
161 | tar.bz2 (bzip, -9) | 565,008 |
162 | WIM (WIMGAPI, LZMS solid) | 521,366 |
163 | WIM (wimlib, LZMS solid) | 515,800 |
164 | tar.xz (xz, default) | 486,916 |
165 | tar.xz (xz, -9) | 486,904 |
166 | 7z (7-zip, default) | 484,700 |
167 | 7z (7-zip, -9) | 483,239 |
168 =====================================================
170 Note: WIM does even better on directory trees containing duplicate files, which
171 the Canterbury corpus doesn't have.
175 WIM images may contain data, such as alternate data streams and
176 compression/encryption flags, that are best represented on the NTFS filesystem
177 used on Windows. Also, WIM images may contain security descriptors which are
178 specific to Windows and cannot be represented on other operating systems.
179 wimlib handles this NTFS-specific or Windows-specific data in a
180 platform-dependent way:
182 * In the Windows version of wimlib and wimlib-imagex, NTFS-specific and
183 Windows-specific data are supported natively.
185 * In the UNIX version of wimlib and wimlib-imagex, NTFS-specific and
186 Windows-specific data are ordinarily ignored; however, there is also special
187 support for capturing and extracting images directly to/from unmounted NTFS
188 volumes. This was made possible with the help of libntfs-3g from the
191 For both platforms the code for NTFS capture and extraction is complete enough
192 that it is possible to apply an image from the "install.wim" contained in recent
193 Windows installation media (Vista or later) directly to an NTFS filesystem, and
194 then boot Windows from it after preparing the Boot Configuration Data. In
195 addition, a Windows installation can be captured (or backed up) into a WIM file,
196 and then re-applied later.
200 A major use for wimlib and wimlib-imagex is to create customized images of
201 Windows PE, the Windows Preinstallation Environment, on either UNIX-like systems
202 or Windows without having to rely on Microsoft's software and its restrictions
205 Windows PE is a lightweight version of Windows that can run entirely from memory
206 and can be used to install Windows from local media or a network drive or
207 perform maintenance. It is the operating system that runs when you boot from
208 the Windows installation media.
210 You can find Windows PE on the installation media for Windows (Vista or later)
211 as the file `sources/boot.wim'. Windows PE can also be found in the Windows
212 Automated Installation Kit (WAIK), which is free to download from Microsoft,
213 inside the `WinPE.cab' file, which you can extract natively on Windows, or on
214 UNIX-like systems if you install either the `cabextract' or `p7zip' programs.
216 In addition, Windows installations and recovery partitions frequently contain a
217 WIM containing an image of the Windows Recovery Environment, which is similar to
220 A shell script `mkwinpeimg' is distributed with wimlib on UNIX-like systems to
221 ease the process of creating and customizing a bootable Windows PE image.
225 This section documents the dependencies of wimlib and the programs distributed
226 with it, when building for a UNIX-like system from source. If you have
227 downloaded the Windows binary distribution of wimlib and wimlib-imagex then all
228 dependencies were already included and this section is irrelevant.
231 This is a commonly used free library to read and write XML documents.
232 Almost all Linux distributions should include this; however, you may
233 need to install the header files, which might be in a package named
234 "libxml2-dev" or similar. For more information see http://xmlsoft.org/.
236 * libfuse (optional but recommended)
237 Unless configured --without-fuse, wimlib requires a non-ancient version
238 of libfuse. Most Linux distributions already include this, but make
239 sure you have the libfuse package installed, and also libfuse-dev if
240 your distribution distributes header files separately. FUSE also
241 requires a kernel module. If the kernel module is available it should
242 automatically be loaded if you try to mount a WIM image. For more
243 information see http://fuse.sourceforge.net/.
245 * libattr (optional but recommended)
246 Unless configured --without-fuse, wimlib also requires libattr. Almost
247 all Linux distributions should include this; however, you may need to
248 install the header files, which might be in a package named "attr-dev",
249 "libattr1-dev", or similar.
251 * libntfs-3g (optional but recommended)
252 Unless configured --without-ntfs-3g, wimlib requires the library and
253 headers for libntfs-3g version 2011-4-12 or later to be installed.
255 * OpenSSL / libcrypto (optional)
256 wimlib can use the SHA-1 message digest implementation from libcrypto
257 (usually provided by OpenSSL) instead of compiling in yet another SHA-1
262 * syslinux (optional)
263 * cabextract (optional)
264 The `mkwinpeimg' shell script will look for several other programs
265 depending on what options are given to it. Depending on your Linux
266 distribution, you may already have these programs installed, or they may
267 be in the software repository. Making an ISO filesystem requires
268 `mkisofs' from `cdrkit' (http://www.cdrkit.org). Making a disk image
269 requires `mtools' (http://www.gnu.org/software/mtools) and `syslinux'
270 (http://www.syslinux.org). Retrieving files from the Windows Automated
271 Installation Kit requires `cabextract' (http://www.cabextract.org.uk).
275 This section documents the most important options that may be passed to the
276 "configure" script when building from source:
279 If libntfs-3g is not available or is not version 2011-4-12 or later,
280 wimlib can be built without it, in which case it will not be possible to
281 capture or apply WIM images directly from/to NTFS volumes.
283 The default is --with-ntfs-3g when building for any UNIX-like system,
284 and --without-ntfs-3g when building for Windows.
287 The --without-fuse option disables support for mounting WIM images.
288 This removes dependencies on libfuse, librt, and libattr. The wimmount,
289 wimmountrw, and wimunmount commands will not work.
291 The default is --with-fuse when building for Linux, and --without-fuse
295 Build in functions for SHA-1 rather than using external SHA-1 functions
296 from libcrypto (usually provided by OpenSSL).
298 The default is to use libcrypto if it is found on your system.
302 wimlib works on both UNIX-like systems (Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, etc.) and
303 Windows (XP and later).
305 As much code as possible is shared among all supported platforms, but there
306 necessarily are some differences in what features are supported on each platform
307 and how they are implemented. Most notable is that file tree scanning and
308 extraction are implemented separately for Windows, UNIX, and UNIX (NTFS-3g
309 mode), to ensure a fast and feature-rich implementation of each platform/mode.
311 wimlib is mainly used on x86 and x86_64 CPUs, but it should also work on a
312 number of other GCC-supported 32-bit or 64-bit architectures. It has been
313 tested on the ARM and MIPS architectures.
315 Currently, gcc and clang are the only supported compilers. A few nonstandard
316 extensions are used in the code.
320 The WIM file format is partially specified in a document that can be found in
321 the Microsoft Download Center. However, this document really only provides an
322 overview of the format and is not a formal specification. It also does not
323 cover later extensions of the format, such as solid resources.
325 With regards to the supported compression formats:
327 - Microsoft has official documentation for XPRESS that is of reasonable quality.
328 - Microsoft has official documentation for LZX, but in two different documents,
329 neither of which is completely applicable to its use in the WIM format, and
330 the first of which contains multiple errors.
331 - There does not seem to be any official documentation for LZMS, so my comments
332 and code in src/lzms_decompress.c may in fact be the best documentation
333 available for this particular compression format.
335 The algorithms used by wimlib's compression and decompression codecs are
336 inspired by a variety of sources, including open source projects and computer
339 The code in ntfs-3g_apply.c and ntfs-3g_capture.c uses the NTFS-3g library,
340 which is a library for reading and writing to NTFS filesystems (the filesystem
341 used by recent versions of Windows). See
342 http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/ for more information.
344 A limited number of other free programs can handle some parts of the WIM
347 * 7-zip is able to extract and create WIMs (as well as files in many
348 other archive formats). However, wimlib is designed specifically to handle
349 WIM files and provides features previously only available in Microsoft's
350 implementation, such as the ability to mount WIMs read-write as well as
351 read-only, the ability to create compressed WIMs, the correct handling of
352 security descriptors and hard links, support for LZMS compression, and
353 support for solid archives.
354 * ImagePyX (https://github.com/maxpat78/ImagePyX) is a Python program that
355 provides some capabilities of wimlib-imagex, with the help of external
358 If you are looking for an archive format that provides features similar to WIM
359 but was designed primarily for UNIX, you may want to consider SquashFS
360 (http://squashfs.sourceforge.net/). However, you may find that wimlib works
361 surprisingly well on UNIX. It will store hard links and symbolic links, and it
362 has optional support for storing UNIX owners, groups, modes, and special files
363 such as device nodes and FIFOs. Actually, I use it to back up my own files on
368 wimlib was originally a project started by Carl Thijssen for use on Linux in the
369 Ultimate Deployment Appliance (http://www.ultimatedeployment.org/). Since then
370 the code has been entirely rewritten and improved (main author: Eric Biggers).
371 Windows support has been available since version 1.3.0 (March 2013). A list of
372 version-to-version changes can be found in the NEWS file.
374 LICENSE AND DISCLAIMER
376 See COPYING for information about the license.
378 wimlib is independently developed and does not contain any code, data, or files
379 copyrighted by Microsoft. It is not known to be affected by any patents.
381 On UNIX-like systems, if you do not want wimlib to be dynamically linked with
382 libcrypto (OpenSSL), configure with --without-libcrypto. This replaces the SHA1
383 implementation with built-in code and there will be no difference in
386 wimlib comes with no warranty whatsoever. Please submit a bug report (to
387 ebiggers3@gmail.com) if you find a bug in wimlib and/or wimlib-imagex.