# squashfs

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A PURE Go library to read squashfs. There is currently no plans to add archive creation support as it will almost always be better to just call `mksquashfs`. I could see some possible use cases, but probably won't spend time on it unless it's requested (open a discussion if you want this feature).

The library has two parts with this `github.com/CalebQ42/squashfs` being easy to use as it implements `io/fs` interfaces and doesn't expose unnecessary information. 95% this is the library you want. If you need lower level access to the information, use `github.com/CalebQ42/squashfs/low` where far more information is exposed.

Currently has support for reading squashfs files and extracting files and folders.

Special thanks to <https://dr-emann.github.io/squashfs/> for some VERY important information in an easy to understand format.
Thanks also to [distri's squashfs library](https://github.com/distr1/distri/tree/master/internal/squashfs) as I referenced it to figure some things out (and double check others).

## Build tags

As of `v1.1.0` this library has two optional build tags: `no_gpl` and `no_obsolete`. `no_gpl` disables the ability to read archives with lzo compression due to the library's gpl license. `no_obsolete` removes "obsolete" compression types for a reduced compilation size; currently this only disable lzma compression since it's superseded by xz.

## FUSE

As of `v1.0`, FUSE capabilities has been moved to [a separate library](https://github.com/CalebQ42/squashfuse).

## Limitations

* No Xattr parsing.
* Socket files are not extracted.
  * From my research, it seems like a socket file would be useless if it could be created.
* Fifo files are ignored on `darwin`

## Issues

* Significantly slower then `unsquashfs` when nested images
  * This seems to be related to above along with the general optimization of `unsquashfs` and it's compression libraries.
    * Not to mention it's written in C
  * Times seem to be largely dependent on file tree size and compression type.
    * My main testing image (~100MB) using Zstd takes about 5x longer.
    * An Arch Linux airootfs image (~780MB) using XZ compression with LZMA filters takes about 30x longer.
    * A Tensorflow docker image (~3.3GB) using Zstd takes about 12x longer.

Note: These numbers are using `FastOptions()`. `DefaultOptions()` takes about 2x longer.

## Recommendations on Usage

Due to the above performance consideration, this library should only be used to access files within the archive without extraction, or to mount it via Fuse.

* Neither of these use cases are largely effected by the issue above.