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.
+wimlib can create XPRESS or LZX compressed WIM archives. Currently, the 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
+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
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
+ wimlib imagex (v1.2.1): 138,971,353 bytes 131,379,943 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
+ wimlib imagex (v1.2.1, 2 threads): 11 sec 17 sec
Microsoft imagex.exe: 25 sec 89 sec
NTFS SUPPORT
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. Before mounting a WIM you need to load the POSIX message
-queue module (run `kldload mqueuefs').
+--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