1 Only the most important changes more recent than version 0.6 are noted here.
4 Added support for "WIMBoot". On any platform, you can now capture a WIM
5 as WIMBoot-compatible. In addition, on Windows, specifically Windows
6 8.1 Update 1 and later, you can now apply a WIM archive in a special
7 mode that causes extracted files to be externally backed by the WIM
8 archive. See the documentation for the new '--wimboot' option to
9 wimcapture and wimapply, respectively, for more information.
12 Case-insensitive comparisons of strings (e.g. filenames) containing
13 UTF-16 codepoints above 32767 are now done correctly.
15 Fixed build failure on Mac OS X.
17 wimunmount now provides the '--new-image' option to cause changes to a
18 read-write mounted image to be committed as a new image rather than as
19 an update of the mounted image. (The corresponding new library flag is
20 WIMLIB_UNMOUNT_FLAG_NEW_IMAGE.)
22 The LZMS ("recovery") compression chunk size, or "dictionary size", may
23 now be up to 1 GiB (1,073,741,824 bytes).
25 The performance of LZX ("maximum") and LZMS ("recovery") compression
26 with large chunk sizes has been slightly improved.
29 Stored files with size exactly 4 GiB (4,294,967,296 bytes) are now
30 decompressed correctly.
32 Fixed a bug in the LZX compressor introduced in v1.5.3. The bug
33 occurred in an unlikely case, and due to validity checks it did not
34 affect successfully created archives.
36 Fixed a minor compatibility issue with the LZMS compressor and
37 decompressor. This is *not* the default compression type and was only
38 introduced in v1.6.0. In the unlikely event that you created an
39 LZMS-compressed WIM with v1.6.0 and a checksum error is reported when
40 applying it with v1.6.1, decompress it with v1.6.0 then compress it with
43 Memory usage for LZMS and LZX compression has been decreased.
45 wimextract now allows wildcard characters in paths specified on the
46 command line. Also, the '--strict-wildcards' option has been removed
47 and replaced with the inverse option '--nullglob'. See the
48 documentation for wimextract for more details and changes.
50 The wimlib_extract_files() function is now considered deprecated in
51 favor of wimlib_extract_paths().
53 Fixed more permissions problems when extracting files on Windows.
55 A new '--no-attributes' option has been added to wimapply and
56 wimextract. The library flag is WIMLIB_EXTRACT_FLAG_NO_ATTRIBUTES.
58 The default chunk size is now set correctly when changing the
59 compression type of a WIM, for example with 'wimoptimize'.
61 The '--metadata' option to wiminfo has been replaced with the
62 '--detailed' option to wimdir.
64 In relevant wimlib-imagex commands, '--solid' may now be used as an
65 alias for '--pack-streams'.
68 Support for extracting and updating the new version 3584 WIMs has been
69 added. These WIMs typically pack many streams ("files") together into a
70 single compressed resource, thereby saving space. This degrades the
71 performance of random access (such as that which occurs on a mounted
72 image), but optimizations have been implemented for extraction. These
73 new WIM files also typically use a new compression format (LZMS), which
74 is similar to LZMA and can offer a better compression ratio than LZX.
75 These new WIM files can be created using `wimcapture' with
76 the '--compress=lzms --pack-streams' options. Note: this new WIM format
77 is used by the Windows 8 web downloader, but important segments of the
78 raw '.esd' files are encrypted, so wimlib will not be able to extract
79 such files until they are first decrypted.
81 wimlib now supports extracting files and directories from a WIM image
82 based on a "listfile" that itself contains the list of paths to extract.
83 For `wimextract', the syntax is to specify @LISTFILE instead of a PATH,
84 and for the library itself, the new APIs are wimlib_extract_pathlist()
85 and wimlib_extract_paths(). Path globs containing wildcard characters
88 For searching WIM files, wimlib now has configurable case sensitivity.
89 The default on Windows is still case-insensitive and the default on
90 UNIX-like systems is still case-sensitive, but this can be overridden
91 on either platform through flags to wimlib_global_init(). For
92 `wimlib-imagex', the environmental variable WIMLIB_IMAGEX_IGNORE_CASE
93 can be set to 1 or 0 for case-insensitive or case-sensitive behavior,
96 Support for compression chunk sizes greater than the default of 32768
97 bytes has been added. A larger chunk size typically results in a better
98 compression ratio. However, the MS implementation is seemingly not
99 compatible with all chunk sizes, especially for LZX compression, so the
100 defaults remain unchanged, with the exception of the new LZMS-compressed
101 WIMs, which use a larger chunk size by default.
103 The compression/decompression API exported by wimlib has been changed.
104 Now one set of functions handles all supported compression formats.
106 `wimcapture' and `wimappend' will now display the progress of scanning
107 the directory tree to capture, in addition to the progress of writing
108 data to the WIM. The '--verbose' option no longer does anything. The
109 library API change for this is the addition of several members to
110 `struct wimlib_progress_info_scan' available to progress callbacks.
112 `mkwinpeimg' now correctly handles the '--start-script' option when the
113 start script is not in the working directory.
115 Sequential extraction, previously requested by using
116 WIMLIB_EXTRACT_FLAG_SEQUENTIAL, is now the default.
117 WIMLIB_EXTRACT_FLAG_FILE_ORDER can be used to get the old default
118 behavior (extract in file order).
121 The new LZX compressor added in v1.5.2 has been improved and is now
122 enabled by default, except when `wimcapture' or `wimappend' is run
123 *without* the '--compress' option, in which case the faster LZX
124 compressor is used (the same as before). This behavior is reasonably
125 consistent with ImageX which actually uses "fast" (XPRESS) compression
126 by default. In those cases, use '--compress=maximum' to explicitly
127 capture a WIM image using the new (slower but better) LZX compressor.
129 The '--compress-slow' option still exists to `wimlib-imagex optimize',
130 but its new behavior is to tweak the new LZX compressor even more to
131 produce an even better compression ratio at the cost of more time spent
134 `wimlib-imagex optimize' now supports the '--compress=TYPE' option,
135 which recompresses the WIM file using the specified compression TYPE.
136 The new library API function used for this is
137 wimlib_set_output_compression_type().
139 Added the wimlib_get_xml_data() function to allow library clients to
140 easily retrieve the raw XML data from a WIM file if needed.
142 Fixed a bug that could cause an error code to be incorrectly returned
143 when writing XML data containing a <WINDOWS> element.
145 Mounted WIM images will now correctly show the default file stream even
146 if appears in the alternate data stream entries of the corresponding WIM
150 Added a new experimental LZX compressor which can be enabled by passing
151 '--compress-slow' to `wimlib-imagex capture' or `wimlib-imagex
152 optimize'. (The latter is only applicable if the WIM is already
153 LZX-compressed and the '--recompress' option is also given.) The
154 experimental compressor is much slower but compresses the data slightly
155 more --- currently usually to within a fraction of a percent of the
156 results from WIMGAPI/ImageX.
158 A workaround has been added for compatibility with versions of WinPE
159 that interpret alternate data stream entries in the boot WIM
162 An alignment bug that caused a crash in the LZX decompressor on some
165 wimlib now attempts to clear the WIM_HDR_FLAG_WRITE_IN_PROGRESS flag in
166 the WIM header when restoring the previous state of a WIM it failed to
169 Added a workaround to avoid an access denied error on Windows when
170 replacing a WIM file that another process has opened.
173 wimlib can now open WinPE WIMs from WAIK v2.1, which had a quirk that
174 needed to be handled.
176 A bug in the interpretation of negative IMAGE indices in the
177 --update-of=[WIMFILE:]IMAGE option to `wimlib-imagex capture' and
178 `wimlib-imagex append' has been fixed.
180 A workaround has been added to successfully apply security descriptors
181 with empty DACLs when the NTFS-3g apply mode is being used with NTFS-3g
182 2013.1.13 or earlier.
184 `wimlib-imagex capture' can now accept the '--delta-from' option
188 Added support for "pipable" WIMs. Pipable WIMs allow capturing images
189 to standard output and applying images from standard input, but they are
190 not compatible with Microsoft's software and are not created by default.
191 See the documentation for --pipable flag of `wimlib-imagex capture' for
194 To better support incremental backups, added support for declaring an
195 image as a modified form of another image. See the documentation for
196 the '--update-of' option of `wimlib-imagex append' and `wimlib-imagex
199 Added supported for "delta" WIMs. See the documentation for the
200 '--delta-from' option of `wimlib-imagex capture'.
202 The library support for managing split WIMs has been changed to support
203 other arrangements, such as delta WIMs, and be easier to use. This
204 change is visible in `wimlib-imagex', which also can now accept the
205 '--ref' option multiple times, and also now supports "delta" WIMs as
208 wimlib now preserves WIM integrity tables by default, even if
209 WIMLIB_WRITE_FLAG_CHECK_INTEGRITY is not specified. This changes the
210 behavior of `wimlib-imagex' whenever the WIM being operated on contains
211 an integrity table and the '--check' option is not specified.
213 `wimlib-imagex capture' now creates LZX-compressed WIMs by default
214 (when --compress is not specified). This provides the best compression
215 ratio by default, which is usually what is desired, at a cost of some
218 `wimlib-imagex' now supports being invoked as wimCOMMAND, where COMMAND
219 is the command as in `wimlib-imagex COMMAND'; for example, it can be
220 invoked as `wimapply' as an alternative to `wimlib-imagex apply'. The
221 appropriate hard links are created in UNIX installations of
222 `wimlib-imagex', while for the Windows distribution of `wimlib-imagex',
223 batch files that emulate this behavior are generated.
225 Security descriptors are now extracted correctly on Windows.
227 Fixed archiving DOS names in NTFS-3g capture mode.
229 The extraction code has been rewritten and it will now be easier to
230 support new features on all supported backends (currently Win32, UNIX,
231 and NTFS-3g). For example, hard-linked extraction mode (--hardlink) is
232 now supported on all backends, not just UNIX.
234 `mkwinpeimg' now supports grabbing files from the WAIK supplement rather
235 than the WAIK itself.
237 wimlib_global_init() now, by default, attempts to acquire additional
238 privileges on Windows, so library clients need not do this.
240 This update bumps the shared library version number up to 9, since it is
241 not binary compatibible with previous releases.
244 Fixed bug in `wimlib-imagex export' that made it impossible to export an
245 image from a WIM that is readonly at the filesystem level.
247 Return error code rather than segfaulting when trying to list files from
248 a non-first part of a split WIM.
250 Joining a WIM will now preserve the RP_FIX and READONLY flags.
253 On Windows, paths given to wimlib-imagex are now treated case
256 Improved behavior regarding invalid filenames; in particular, on
257 Windows, wimlib-imagex will, when extracting, now omit (with an option
258 to override this default) filenames differing only in case, or filenames
259 containing characters not valid on Windows.
261 On Windows, wimlib now supports capturing and extracting long paths
262 (longer than the so-called MAX_PATH).
264 On Windows, `wimlib-imagex update' now acquires proper privileges when
265 running as an Administrator.
267 `wimlib-imagex update' will now complain if no image is specified when
268 trying to update a multi-image WIM.
270 `wimlib-imagex update' now supports specifying a single update command
271 directly on the command line using the --command option.
273 wimlib-imagex will now choose different units for progress messages,
274 depending on the amount of data that needs to be processed.
276 `wimlib-imagex append' will now generate a unique WIM image name if no
277 name is specified and the defaulted name already exists in the WIM.
279 wimlib now allows you to create unnamed WIM images, which can then only
280 be referred to by index.
282 wimlib now allows you to explicitly declare you want write access to a
283 WIM by providing the WIMLIB_OPEN_FLAG_WRITE_ACCESS flag to
286 wimlib now respects the WIM_HDR_FLAG_READONLY flag when set in the WIM
289 Progress callbacks have been added to wimlib's wimlib_update_image()
292 Added wimlib_get_wim_info(), wimlib_set_wim_info(),
293 wimlib_iterate_dir_tree(), and wimlib_iterate_lookup_table() functions
296 NTFS-3g capture now only warns about two conditions previously treated
299 Fixed a couple issues with using wimlib-imagex on UDF filesystems on
302 wimlib now correctly detects and returns an error when reading a WIM
303 image with a cyclic directory structure. (Fun fact: such a WIM will
304 crash Microsoft's software.)
307 Added new "extract" and "update" subcommands to wimlib-imagex, along
308 with associated APIs in the library. These commands are intended mainly
309 for Windows use but can be used on UNIX as well.
311 Many documentation improvements.
313 Fixed a bug in the Windows build where relative symbolic links were not
314 captured in reparse-point fixup mode.
316 Fixed a bug in the Windows build where file handles were left open to
317 the WIM file, causing `wimlib_imagex optimize' to fail in some cases.
319 Fixed a bug in the Windows build of wimlib-imagex where globbing
320 split-WIM parts could cause the program to crash.
322 Fixed a bug where the creation time of WIM images would be shown instead
323 of the last modification time.
325 With the Windows build it is now possible to restore a WIM containing
326 symbolic links as a non-Administrator; however you will receive warnings
327 about not being able to extract the symbolic links.
330 Capturing a WIM image should now be significantly faster in most cases
331 due to improved use of the operating system's cache and avoiding reading
332 files twice whenever possible.
334 The Windows build should now work on Windows XP.
336 The Windows build now supports capturing and restoring hidden,
337 compressed, sparse, and encrypted files.
339 The Windows build now supports capturing and applying WIM images from
340 filesystems other than NTFS (with some reduced functionality).
342 The Windows build now extracts short names correctly.
344 Added support for "reparse-point" fixups (i.e. fixing up of symbolic
345 links). See docs for --rpfix and --norpfix flags of `wimlib-imagex
346 capture' and `wimlib-imagex apply'.
348 The performance of splitting and joining WIMs should be slightly
351 The LZX and XPRESS compression and decompression functions are now
352 exported from the library.
355 Improvements and bugfixes for the Windows build.
357 Added --strict-acls options.
359 Fixed the way that wimlib determines the order of images in the WIM.
362 Since wimlib can now be used on Windows, wimlib's implementation of
363 ImageX has been renamed to wimlib-imagex to avoid confusion with
364 Microsoft's implementation of ImageX, which would have the same file
365 name ("imagex.exe"). If you really don't like this you can pass the
366 --with-imagex-progname option to `configure' to choose a different name,
367 or even simply rename the binary yourself (but the former way will
368 configure the man pages to use the chosen name).
370 Various bugs fixed in the Windows build. Mainly to do with capturing
371 and restoring alternate data streams correctly in weird cases, and
372 requesting the correct privileges when opening files. Also added the
373 --noacls options to wimlib-imagex capture, append, and apply.
375 Windows build again: FindFirstStreamW() and FindNextStreamW() are now
376 dynamically loaded, so this may make the library compatible with Windows
377 XP (however, there may still be other problems).
380 Added experimental support for native Windows builds. Binaries can be
381 downloaded from the SourceForge page.
383 --source-list option added to `imagex capture' and `imagex append'.
385 Better support for different character encodings.
388 Storing UNIX file owners, groups, and modes in WIM images is now
389 possible using `imagex capture' with the --unix-data flag.
391 Minor bug fixes and documentation fixes.
394 NTFS capture: Fixed capturing duplicate reparse points.
396 NTFS capture: Capture first unnamed stream if there are more than one
397 (print warning instead of error).
399 Allow multiple test cases to execute concurrently (e.g. make -j2 check).
402 Added --arch switch to mkwinpeimg script to support getting AMD64 WinPE
405 Update to work with ntfs-3g version 2013.1.13.
408 Fixed truncating file to shorter but non-zero length on read-write
411 Various code cleanups and minor documentation fixes.
414 LZX and XPRESS decompression have received some additional optimizations
415 and should now be even faster. (Although, they were already pretty
416 fast--- much faster than typical I/O speeds.)
418 Fixed a bug introduced in v1.2.1 that would cause a directory tree
419 containing hard links to be captured incorrectly in some cases.
422 By default, unmounting a read-write mounted WIM with 'imagex unmount
423 --commit' will now change the WIM in-place without needing to write the
424 entire WIM again. Use 'imagex unmount --commit --rebuild' to get the
427 'imagex unmount' no longer has a hard-coded limit of 10 minutes to wait
428 for a response from the daemon servicing the mounted WIM. Instead,
429 every second 'imagex unmount' will check if the daemon is still alive,
430 and keep waiting if so, otherwise terminate with an error.
432 'imagex unmount --commit' on a read-write mounted WIM will now print
433 progress information regarding the writing of new or modified streams
434 the WIM, just like when capturing or appending a WIM.
436 A small change has been made to XPRESS compression and it should improve
437 the compression ratio slightly.
439 A change was made that may improve performance slightly when applying a
440 WIM image to a NTFS volume.
442 Microsoft has managed to introduce even more bugs into their software,
443 and now the WIMs for Windows 8 have incorrect (too low) reference counts
444 for some streams. This is unsafe because such streams can be removed
445 when they are in actuality still referenced in the WIM (perhaps by a
446 different image). wimlib will now work around this problem by fixing
447 the stream reference counts. This is only done when wimlib_delete_image() is
448 called ('imagex delete') or when wimlib_mount_image() is called with
449 WIMLIB_MOUNT_FLAG_READWRITE ('imagex mountrw'). Please note that this
450 requires reading the metadata for all images in the WIM, so this will
451 make these operations noticably slower on WIMs with multiple images.
453 Various other bugfixes.
456 Appending images to a WIM is now be done by default without re-building
457 the whole WIM. Use the --rebuild flag to get the old behavior (which
458 was to re-build the entire WIM when a new image is appended).
460 A new command `imagex optimize' is now available to manually re-build a
461 WIM that has wasted space due to repeated appends.
463 Progress information has been improved, and now arbitrary callback
464 functions can be used to show the progress of a WIM operation.
466 A possible bug with changing the bootable image of a WIM was fixed.
468 Some advisory locking is now done to prevent two processes from
469 modifying a WIM at the same time (but only in some cases). For example,
470 you cannot mount two images from a WIM read-write at the same time.
472 Some functions have been reorganized:
473 * wimlib_mount() renamed to wimlib_mount_image().
474 * wimlib_unmount() renamed to wimlib_unmount_image().
475 * wimlib_overwrite_xml_and_header() removed as
476 wimlib_overwrite() suffices now.
477 * wimlib_apply_image_to_ntfs_volume() removed as
478 wimlib_extract_image() suffices now.
479 * wimlib_add_image_from_ntfs_volume() removed as
480 * wimlib_add_image() suffices now.
482 Previously, the soname of libwim.so has been 0.0.0, despite many
483 interface changes. The soname is now updated to 1.0.0 and will now be
484 updated each release.
487 Resources will now be compressed using multiple threads by default.
488 (This applies to `imagex capture', `imagex append', and `imagex
491 Some performance improvements in mounted WIMs.
493 More progress information is shown when capturing a WIM.
496 Lots of minor fixes, code cleanups, and some documentation updates.
497 Nothing in particular is really noteworthy.
500 LZX and XPRESS compression improvements.
502 Fixed calculation of Directory Count, File Count, Total Bytes, and Hard
503 Link Bytes of the WIM.
506 Fixed bug when capturing NTFS file with multiple named data streams.
508 Internally, we are now using inode structures, even though these don't
509 appear literally in the WIM file. This simplifies some of the code
510 (mainly for WIM mounting) and likely fixed a few problems, although it
514 Fixed problem when exporting images from XPRESS to LZX compressed WIM or
518 Enough changes to call it version 1.0.0!
520 Capturing a WIM directly from a NTFS volume, and applying a WIM directly
521 to a NTFS volume, is now supported.
523 Hard links and symbolic links have much improved support. They are
524 supported for WIM capture, WIM application, and mounted WIMs (you can
525 even make them on read-write mounted WIMs).
527 Alternate data streams are now supported on mounted WIMs through an
528 xattr or a Windows-style stream interface. Also they are supported when
529 capturing a WIM from NTFS or applying a WIM to NTFS.
531 Split WIMs are better supported. You may now apply an image directly
532 from a split WIM, mount an image from a split WIM read-only, or export
533 an image from a split WIM.
535 Using a capture configuration file is now supported (but not fully yet).
537 SHA1 message digests are checked in more places, so we can make sure
538 applied and captured data is correct.
540 Man pages have been updated and consolidated.
543 Fixed segfault when unmounting read-only WIM.
546 Support for joining and splitting WIMs.
547 Also, security data is now preserved by default.
550 Can now build with older gcc and system headers, like on CentOS 5.
553 Fixed bug that made it impossible to overwrite files in read-write
557 Write byte-order mark before WIM XML data. (imagex.exe requires this to