- WIMLIB
+ WIMLIB
-This is wimlib version 1.0.0 (September 2012). wimlib can be used to read,
-write, and mount files in the Windows Imaging Format (WIM files). These
-files are normally created by using the `imagex.exe' utility on Windows,
-but this library provides a free implementetion of imagex for UNIX-based
-systems.
+This is wimlib version 1.2.0 (November 2012). wimlib can be used to read,
+write, and mount files in the Windows Imaging Format (WIM files). These files
+are normally created by using the `imagex.exe' utility on Windows, but this
+library provides a free implementation of imagex for UNIX-based systems.
WIM FILES
Microsoft provides documentation for the WIM file format, XPRESS compression
format, and LZX compression format. The XPRESS documentation is acceptable, but
the LZX documentation is not entirely correct, and the WIM documentation itself
-is very incomplete and is of unacceptable quality.
+is incomplete.
- WINDOWS PE
+A WIM file may be either stand-alone or split into multiple parts.
-A major use for this library is to create customized images of Windows PE, the
-Windows Preinstallation Environment, without having to rely on Windows. Windows
-PE is a lightweight version of Windows that can run entirely from memory and can
-be used to install Windows from local media or a network drive or perform
-maintenance. Windows PE is the operating system that runs when you boot from
-the Windows installation media.
+ PROGRAMS
-You can find Windows PE on the installation DVD for Windows Vista, Windows 7, or
-Windows 8, in the file `sources/boot.wim'. Windows PE can also be found in the
-Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK), which is free to download from
-Microsoft, inside the `WinPE.cab' file, which you can extract if you install
-either the `cabextract' or `p7zip' programs.
+wimlib provides a public API for other programs to use, but also comes with two
+programs: `imagex' and `mkwinpeimg'.
-In addition, Windows installations and recovery partitions frequently contain a
-WIM containing an image of the Windows Recovery Environment, which is similar to
-Windows PE.
+`imagex' is intended to be like the imagex.exe program from Windows. `imagex'
+can be used to create, extract, and mount WIM files. Both read-only and
+read-write mounts are supported. See the man page `doc/imagex.1' for more
+details.
+
+`mkwinpeimg' is shell script that makes it easy to create a customized bootable
+image of Windows PE that can be put on a CD or USB drive, or published on a
+server for PXE booting. See the main page `doc/mkwinpeimg.1' for more details.
+
+There is an additional program, `wimapply', that is not installed by default.
+It can be used to build a small executable with the ability to apply a WIM image
+from a standalone WIM, without having to build the whole shared library. This
+could be useful on Linux boot clients that only need to be able to apply a WIM,
+not capture/split/join/append/export/mount a WIM. See `programs/wimapply.c'.
+
+ COMPRESSION RATIO
+
+wimlib can create XPRESS or LZX compressed WIM archives. As of wimlib v1.0.3,
+the XPRESS compression ratio is slightly better than that provided by
+Microsoft's software, while the LZX compression ratio is approaching that of
+Microsoft's software but is not quite there yet. Running time is as good as or
+better than Microsoft's software, especially with multithreaded compression,
+available in 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):
+
+ Table 1. WIM size
+
+ XPRESS Compression LZX Compression
+ wimlib imagex (v1.0.2): 145,283,871 bytes 139,288,293 bytes
+ wimlib imagex (v1.0.3): 139,288,293 bytes 131,379,869 bytes
+ Microsoft imagex.exe: 140,406,981 bytes 127,249,176 bytes
+
+ Table 2. Time to create WIM
+
+ XPRESS Compression LZX Compression
+ wimlib imagex (v1.0.2): 18 sec 49 sec
+ wimlib imagex (v1.0.3): 19 sec 30 sec
+ wimlib imagex (v1.1.0, 2 threads): 11 sec 17 sec
+ Microsoft imagex.exe: 25 sec 89 sec
NTFS SUPPORT
addition, a Windows installation can be captured (or backed up) into a WIM file,
and then re-applied later.
- PROGRAMS
+ WINDOWS PE
-wimlib provides a public API for other programs to use, but also comes with two
-programs: `imagex' and `mkwinpeimg'.
+A major use for this library is to create customized images of Windows PE, the
+Windows Preinstallation Environment, without having to rely on Windows. Windows
+PE is a lightweight version of Windows that can run entirely from memory and can
+be used to install Windows from local media or a network drive or perform
+maintenance. Windows PE is the operating system that runs when you boot from
+the Windows installation media.
-`imagex' is intended to be like the imagex.exe program from Windows. `imagex'
-can be used to create, extract, and mount WIM files. Both read-only and
-read-write mounts are supported. See the man page `doc/imagex.1' for more
-details.
+You can find Windows PE on the installation DVD for Windows Vista, Windows 7, or
+Windows 8, in the file `sources/boot.wim'. Windows PE can also be found in the
+Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK), which is free to download from
+Microsoft, inside the `WinPE.cab' file, which you can extract if you install
+either the `cabextract' or `p7zip' programs.
-`mkwinpeimg' is shell script that makes it easy to create a customized bootable
-image of Windows PE that can be put on a CD or USB drive, or published on a
-server for PXE booting. See the main page `doc/mkwinpeiso.1' for more details.
+In addition, Windows installations and recovery partitions frequently contain a
+WIM containing an image of the Windows Recovery Environment, which is similar to
+Windows PE.
DEPENDENCIES
-* libxml2
+* libxml2 (required)
This is a commonly used free library to read and write XML files. You
likely already have it installed as a dependency for some other program.
For more information see http://xmlsoft.org/.
-* libfuse
+* libfuse (optional but highly recommended)
Unless configured with --without-fuse, wimlib requires a non-ancient
- version of libfuse to be installed. see above). Most GNU/Linux
- distributions already include this, but make sure you have the libfuse
- package installed (libfuse-dev if your distribution distributes header
- files separately). FUSE also requires a kernel module.
- If the kernel module is available it will automatically be loaded if you
- try to mount a WIM file. For more information see
- http://fuse.sourceforge.net/. FUSE is also available for FreeBSD.
-
-* libntfs-3g
+ version of libfuse to be installed. Most GNU/Linux distributions
+ already include this, but make sure you have the libfuse package
+ installed, and also libfuse-dev if your distribution distributes header
+ files separately. FUSE also requires a kernel module. If the kernel
+ module is available it will automatically be loaded if you try to mount
+ a WIM file. For more information see http://fuse.sourceforge.net/.
+ FUSE is also available for FreeBSD.
+
+* libntfs-3g (optional but highly recommended)
Unless configured with --without-ntfs-3g, wimlib requires the library
- and headers for libntfs-3g to be installed. Currently, the version
- dated 2012-1-15 is required because I've cloned some of the code from
- the library.
+ and headers for libntfs-3g version 2011-4-12 or later to be installed.
+ Versions dated 2010-3-6 and earlier do not work because they are missing
+ the header xattrs.h (and the file xattrs.c, which contains functions we
+ need).
+
+* OpenSSL / libcrypto (optional)
+ wimlib can use the SHA1 message digest code from OpenSSL instead of
+ compiling in yet another SHA1 implementation. (See LICENSE section.)
* cdrkit (optional)
* mtools (optional)
(http://www.syslinux.org). Retrieving files from the Windows Automated
Installation Kit requires `cabextract' (http://www.cabextract.org.uk).
-
CONFIGURATION
Besides the various well-known options, the following options can be passed to
wimlib's `configure' script:
--without-ntfs-3g
- If libntfs-3g is not available or is not the correct version, we can
- build without it. wimlib will then not be able to apply or capture
+ If libntfs-3g is not available or is not version 2011-4-12 or later, we
+ can build without it. wimlib will then not be able to apply or capture
images directly to NTFS volumes.
--without-fuse
the setxattr() function and the attr/xattr.h header be available. The
default is to autodetect whether support is possible.
+--disable-multithreaded-compression
+ By default, data will be compressed using multiple threads when writing
+ a WIM, unless only 1 processor is detected. Specify this option to
+ disable support for this.
+
--enable-ssse3-sha1
Use a very fast assembly language implementation of SHA1 from Intel.
Only use this if the build target supports the SSSE3 instructions.
Removes all error messages from the library. If left in, they still
have to explicitly turned on with wimlib_set_print_errors() in order to
see them. Also, error codes will still be returned regardless of
- whether error messages are printed or not.
+ whether error messages are printed or not.
If --disable-error-messages is given, wimlib_set_print_errors() will
fail with WIMLIB_ERR_UNSUPPORTED if the action is to turn error messages
--disable-assertions
Remove all assertions. Without this option, wimlib will abort() the
program if an assertion fails. An assertion failure should only occur
- if there is a bug in wimlib.
+ if there is a bug in the library.
--enable-debug
Include debugging messages. Only use this option if you have found a
It has been tested on x86 (32-bit) GNU/Linux occasionally.
-I have tested a previous version of wimlib on FreeBSD and it worked, but this is
-not well tested, especially with the more recent versions of this software.
+wimlib may work on FreeBSD and Mac OS X. However, this is not well tested. If
+you do not have libntfs-3g 2011-4-12 or later available, you must configure with
+--without-ntfs-3g. On FreeBSD, before mounting a WIM you need to load the POSIX
+message queue module (run `kldload mqueuefs').
wimlib should work on big endian machines but it has not been tested.
There are no plans to port wimlib to Windows since the programming interface on
Windows is very different and Microsoft's imagex.exe is already available.
- REFERENCES
+ REFERENCES
The WIM file format is specified in a document that can be found in the
Microsoft Download Center. There is a similar document that specifies the LZX
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). Additionally, the code in ntfs-3g-security.c is
-mostly copied from NTFS-3g, but I'm hoping to get rid of this file eventually.
-See http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/ for more information.
+recent versions of Windows). See
+http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/ for more information.
lzx-decomp.c, the code to decompress WIM file resources that are compressed
using LZX compression, is originally based on code from the cabextract project
-(http://www.cabextract.org.uk).
+(http://www.cabextract.org.uk).
lzx-comp.c, the code to compress WIM file resources using LZX compression, is
originally based on code written by Matthew Russotto (www.russotto.net/chm/).
An earlier version of wimlib is being used to deploy Windows 7 from the Ultimate
Deployment Appliance. For more information see
-http://www.ultimatedeployment.org/.
+http://www.ultimatedeployment.org/.
-You can see the documentation about Microsoft's version of the imagex program at
+You can see the documentation about Microsoft's version of the imagex program at
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749447(v=ws.10).aspx, so you can
see how it compares.
+ GNU/Linux equivalents of WIM format
+
+What's the equivalent way to capture the filesystem of a GNU/Linux operating
+system into an archive file? You have a few options:
+
+SquashFS:
+ SquashFS (http://squashfs.sourceforge.net/) provides a compressed,
+ read-only filesystem for Linux, and it's probably the closest equivalent
+ of the WIM format and better designed. Although you can't mount
+ SquashFS read-write, when wimlib does this for WIM files it's really an
+ illusion since the WIM isn't actually modified until the image is
+ unmounted. Multiple top-level images in SquashFS files are not
+ supported, although nothing stops you from just putting each image in a
+ separate directory.
+
+FSArchiver:
+ FSArchiver (http://www.fsarchiver.org/Main_Page) is not widely used, but
+ it appears to have some features quite similar to the WIM format.
+
+Tar:
+ The well-known tar format can usually capture a UNIX filesystem just
+ fine, and compressing the tar file produces a good compression ratio
+ (better than WIM, especially if using XZ compression), but there is no
+ support for random access, file deduplication, multiple images per
+ archive, or extended attributes.
+
+Zip:
+ Zip shares some features with WIM but is not designed to store entire
+ filesystems.
+
+7z:
+ The 7z format has some nice features but is unfortunately not designed
+ with UNIX in mind.
+
MORE INFORMATION
See the manual pages for `imagex', the manual pages for the subcommands of
LICENSE
As of version 1.0.0, wimlib is released under the GNU GPL version 3.0 or later.
-This includes the files in the `programs' directory.
+This includes the files in the `programs' directory as well as the files in the
+`src' directory.
+
+wimlib is independently developed and does not contain any code, data, or files
+copyrighted by Microsoft. It is not known to be affected by any patents.
+
+By default, wimlib will be linked to the system library "libcrypto", which
+probably will be OpenSSL. Some people believe that GPL code cannot be linked to
+OpenSSL without a linking exception. As far as I know, I cannot officially
+include a linking exception with the license of this library because several
+files could be considered derived works of LGPL code copyrighted by others. If
+you believe this to be a problem, configure with --without-libcrypto to avoid
+linking with OpenSSL. There is no difference in functionality--- there will
+just be stand-alone SHA1 message digest code built into the library.
- DISCLAIMER
+ DISCLAIMER
wimlib is experimental. Use Microsoft's `imagex.exe' if you want to make sure
your WIM files are made correctly (but beware: Microsoft's version contains some
-bugs).
+bugs).
Please submit a bug report (to ebiggers3@gmail.com) if you find a bug in wimlib.
git://wimlib.net / wimlib / blobdiff