INTRODUCTION
-This is wimlib version 1.9.1-BETA (February 2016). wimlib is a C library for
+This is wimlib version 1.10.0-BETA (July 2016). wimlib is a C library for
creating, modifying, extracting, and mounting files in the Windows Imaging
Format (WIM files). wimlib and its command-line frontend 'wimlib-imagex'
provide a free and cross-platform alternative to Microsoft's WIMGAPI, ImageX,
files are converted from UNIX-style "man pages", they do document
Windows-specific behavior when appropriate.
- COMPRESSION RATIO
-
-wimlib (and wimlib-imagex) can create XPRESS, LZX, or LZMS compressed WIM files.
-wimlib's compression codecs usually outperform and outcompress their Microsoft
-equivalents. Although results will vary depending on the data being compressed,
-the table below shows results for a common use case: creating an x86 Windows PE
-image ("boot.wim"). Each row shows the compression type, the size of the
-resulting WIM file in bytes, and the time it took to create the file. When
-possible, the results with the Microsoft equivalent are included.
-
- =============================================================================
- | Compression || wimlib (v1.8.3) | WIMGAPI (Windows 10) |
- =============================================================================
- | None [1] || 361,314,224 in 2.7s | 361,315,338 in 3.0s |
- | XPRESS [2] || 137,954,729 in 3.0s | 140,457,081 in 6.4s |
- | XPRESS (slow) [3] || 135,147,054 in 8.0s | N/A |
- | LZX (quick) [4] || 130,098,933 in 3.3s | N/A |
- | LZX (normal) [5] || 126,310,241 in 9.9s | 127,293,110 in 18.5s |
- | LZX (slow) [6] || 125,884,919 in 17.4s | N/A |
- | LZMS (non-solid) [7] || 116,150,698 in 23.4s | N/A |
- | LZMS (solid) [8] || 88,108,326 in 55.6s | 88,771,800 in 90.9s |
- | "WIMBoot" [9] || 166,892,801 in 3.0s | 169,108,689 in 8.9s |
- | "WIMBoot" (slow) [10] || 165,004,333 in 7.8s | N/A |
- =============================================================================
-
-Notes:
- [1] '--compress=none' for wimlib-imagex; '/compress:none' for DISM.
-
- [2] '--compress=XPRESS' for wimlib-imagex; '/compress:fast' for DISM.
- Compression chunk size defaults to 32768 bytes in both cases.
-
- [3] '--compress=XPRESS:80' for wimlib-imagex; no known equivalent for DISM.
- Compression chunk size defaults to 32768 bytes.
-
- [4] '--compress=LZX:20' for wimlib-imagex; no known equivalent for DISM.
- Compression chunk size defaults to 32768 bytes.
-
- [5] '--compress=LZX' or '--compress=LZX:50' or no option for wimlib-imagex;
- '/compress:maximum' for DISM.
- Compression chunk size defaults to 32768 bytes in both cases.
-
- [6] '--compress=LZX:100' for wimlib-imagex; no known equivalent for DISM.
- Compression chunk size defaults to 32768 bytes.
-
- [7] '--compress=LZMS' for wimlib-imagex; no known equivalent for DISM.
- Compression chunk size defaults to 131072 bytes.
-
- [8] '--solid' for wimlib-imagex. Should be '/compress:recovery' for DISM,
- but only works for /Export-Image, not /Capture-Image. Compression chunk
- size in solid resources defaults to 67108864 bytes in both cases.
-
- [9] '--wimboot' for wimlib-imagex; '/wimboot' for DISM.
- This is really XPRESS compression with 4096 byte chunks, so the same as
- '--compress=XPRESS --chunk-size=4096'.
-
- [10] '--wimboot --compress=XPRESS:80' for wimlib-imagex;
- no known equivalent for DISM.
- Same format as [9], but trying harder to get a good compression ratio.
-
-Note: wimlib-imagex's --compress option also accepts the "fast", "maximum", and
-"recovery" aliases for XPRESS, LZX, and LZMS, respectively.
-
-Testing environment:
-
- - 64 bit binaries
- - Windows 10 virtual machine running on Linux with VT-x
- - 4 CPUs and 4 GiB memory given to virtual machine
- - SSD-backed virtual disk
- - All tests done with page cache warmed
-
-The compression ratio provided by wimlib is also competitive with commonly used
-archive formats. Below are file sizes that result when the Canterbury corpus is
-compressed with wimlib (v1.8.3), WIMGAPI (Windows 8.1), and some other
-formats/programs:
-
- =====================================================
- | Format | Size (bytes) |
- =====================================================
- | tar | 2,826,240 |
- | WIM (WIMGAPI, None) | 2,814,254 |
- | WIM (wimlib, None) | 2,814,216 |
- | WIM (WIMGAPI, XPRESS) | 825,536 |
- | WIM (wimlib, XPRESS) | 787,356 |
- | tar.gz (gzip, default) | 738,796 |
- | ZIP (Info-ZIP, default) | 735,334 |
- | tar.gz (gzip, -9) | 733,971 |
- | ZIP (Info-ZIP, -9) | 732,297 |
- | WIM (wimlib, LZX quick) | 686,420 |
- | WIM (WIMGAPI, LZX) | 651,866 |
- | WIM (wimlib, LZX normal) | 623,718 |
- | WIM (wimlib, LZX slow) | 619,382 |
- | WIM (wimlib, LZMS non-solid) | 581,046 |
- | tar.bz2 (bzip, default) | 565,008 |
- | tar.bz2 (bzip, -9) | 565,008 |
- | WIM (WIMGAPI, LZMS solid) | 521,366 |
- | WIM (wimlib, LZMS solid) | 515,800 |
- | tar.xz (xz, default) | 486,916 |
- | tar.xz (xz, -9) | 486,904 |
- | 7z (7-zip, default) | 484,700 |
- | 7z (7-zip, -9) | 483,239 |
- =====================================================
-
-Note: WIM does even better on directory trees containing duplicate files, which
-the Canterbury corpus doesn't have.
+ COMPRESSION
+
+wimlib (and wimlib-imagex) can create XPRESS, LZX, and LZMS compressed WIM
+archives. wimlib's compression codecs usually outperform and outcompress their
+closed-source Microsoft equivalents. Multiple compression levels and chunk
+sizes as well as solid mode compression are supported. Compression is
+multithreaded by default. Detailed benchmark results and descriptions of the
+algorithms used can be found at https://wimlib.net/compression.html.
NTFS SUPPORT
Windows-specific data are ordinarily ignored; however, there is also special
support for capturing and extracting images directly to/from unmounted NTFS
volumes. This was made possible with the help of libntfs-3g from the
- NTFS-3g project.
+ NTFS-3G project.
For both platforms the code for NTFS capture and extraction is complete enough
that it is possible to apply an image from the "install.wim" contained in recent
automatically be loaded if you try to mount a WIM image. For more
information see http://fuse.sourceforge.net/.
-* libattr (optional but recommended)
- Unless configured --without-fuse, wimlib also requires libattr. Almost
- all Linux distributions should include this; however, you may need to
- install the header files, which might be in a package named "attr-dev",
- "libattr1-dev", or similar.
-
* libntfs-3g (optional but recommended)
Unless configured --without-ntfs-3g, wimlib requires the library and
- headers for libntfs-3g version 2011-4-12 or later to be installed.
+ headers for libntfs-3g to be installed. The minimum required version is
+ 2011-4-12, but newer versions contain important bug fixes.
* OpenSSL / libcrypto (optional)
wimlib can use the SHA-1 message digest implementation from libcrypto
--without-fuse
The --without-fuse option disables support for mounting WIM images.
- This removes dependencies on libfuse, librt, and libattr. The wimmount,
+ This removes dependencies on libfuse and librt. The wimmount,
wimmountrw, and wimunmount commands will not work.
The default is --with-fuse when building for Linux, and --without-fuse
As much code as possible is shared among all supported platforms, but there
necessarily are some differences in what features are supported on each platform
and how they are implemented. Most notable is that file tree scanning and
-extraction are implemented separately for Windows, UNIX, and UNIX (NTFS-3g
+extraction are implemented separately for Windows, UNIX, and UNIX (NTFS-3G
mode), to ensure a fast and feature-rich implementation of each platform/mode.
wimlib is mainly used on x86 and x86_64 CPUs, but it should also work on a
inspired by a variety of sources, including open source projects and computer
science papers.
-The code in ntfs-3g_apply.c and ntfs-3g_capture.c uses the NTFS-3g library,
+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.
Windows support has been available since version 1.3.0 (March 2013). A list of
version-to-version changes can be found in the NEWS file.
- LICENSE AND DISCLAIMER
+ NOTICES
+
+wimlib is free software that comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by
+law. See the COPYING file for more details.
-See COPYING for information about the license.
+Bug reports, suggestions, and other contributions are appreciated and may be
+sent via email to ebiggers3@gmail.com or posted to https://wimlib.net/forums.
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.
implementation with built-in code and there will be no difference in
functionality.
-wimlib comes with no warranty whatsoever. Please submit a bug report (to
-ebiggers3@gmail.com) if you find a bug in wimlib and/or wimlib-imagex.
+Note: copyright years may be listed using range notation, e.g., 2012-2016,
+indicating that every year in the range, inclusive, is a copyrightable year that
+would otherwise be listed individually.
git://wimlib.net / wimlib / blobdiff