WIMLIB
-This is wimlib version 1.0.4 (October 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.
+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.
A WIM file may be either stand-alone or split into multiple parts.
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.
+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
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
- Microsoft imagex.exe: 25 sec 89 sec
+ 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
It has been tested on x86 (32-bit) GNU/Linux occasionally.
-wimlib may work on FreeBSD. 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. Also, GNU coreutils is needed to run the test suite. Before
-mounting a WIM you need to load the POSIX message queue module (run `kldload
-mqueuefs').
+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.
git://wimlib.net / wimlib / blobdiff