INTRODUCTION
-This is wimlib version 1.3.3 (April 2013). wimlib is a C library that can be
-used to create, modify, extract, and mount files in the Windows Imaging Format
-(WIM files). These files are normally created by using the `imagex.exe' utility
-on Windows, but wimlib is distributed with a free implementation of ImageX
-called "wimlib-imagex" for both UNIX and Windows.
+This is wimlib version 1.4.0 (May 2013). wimlib is a C library for creating,
+modifying, extracting, and mounting files in the Windows Imaging Format (WIM
+files). These files are normally created by using the `imagex.exe' utility on
+Windows, but wimlib is distributed with a free implementation of ImageX called
+"wimlib-imagex" for both UNIX and Windows.
INSTALLATION
available in wimlib v1.1.0 and later.
The following tables compare the compression ratio and performance for creating
-a compressed Windows PE image (disk usage of about 524 MB, uncompressed WIM size
-361 MB):
+a compressed x86_64 Windows PE image. Note: these timings were done on Windows
+7 so that the times would be fully comparable; however, wimlib-imagex may have
+even better performance on Linux.
Table 1. WIM size
XPRESS Compression LZX Compression
- wimlib-imagex (v1.2.1): 138,971,353 bytes 131,379,943 bytes
- Microsoft imagex.exe: 140,406,981 bytes 127,249,176 bytes
+ wimlib-imagex (v1.4.0): 165,301,379 bytes 155,254,385 bytes
+ Microsoft imagex.exe: 167,212,939 bytes 149,973,212 bytes
Table 2. Time to create WIM
XPRESS Compression LZX Compression
- wimlib-imagex (v1.2.1, 2 threads): 11 sec 17 sec
- Microsoft imagex.exe: 25 sec 89 sec
+ wimlib-imagex (v1.4.0, 2 threads): 18 sec 51 sec
+ Microsoft imagex.exe: 25 sec 93 sec
NTFS SUPPORT
as it exists in reality and not as it exists in Microsoft's poorly written
documentation.
-The code in ntfs-apply.c and ntfs-capture.c uses the NTFS-3g library, which is a
-library for reading and writing to NTFS filesystems (the filesystem used by
-recent versions of Windows). See
+The code in ntfs-3g_apply.c and ntfs-3g_capture.c uses the NTFS-3g library,
+which is a library for reading and writing to NTFS filesystems (the filesystem
+used by recent versions of Windows). See
http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/ for more information.
lzx-decompress.c, the code to decompress WIM file resources that are compressed
You can see the documentation about Microsoft's version of ImageX at
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749447(v=ws.10).aspx, so you can
-see how it compares to the version provided by this library.
+see how it compares to wimlib-imagex.
If you are looking for a UNIX archive format that provides features similar to
WIM, I recommend you take a look at SquashFS (http://squashfs.sourceforge.net/).