Hi there,

Was directed towards the forums from OFTC/#linode.

Would be it completely impossible to add the squashfs driver into the kernel (running x86/LTS at the moment, kernel 2.6.32.16-linode28).

I'd like to keep my old (somewhat largish) email Maildirs inside a squashfs so that they're still available, but without the FS/space overhead. Also, since squashfs is RO, this would save me from accidentally removing old stuff.

Using cramfs is not really an option since it has a rather small size-limit (~250MiB) and writing a custom fuse "driver" just for this seems somewhat of an overkill (especially since writing fuse drivers is.. tedious).

Thanks in advance. Still switching services over to linode, but so far I've been very pleasantly surprised by everything.

I thought squashfs had been merged into the mainline kernel in 2.6.29. I guess it's not enabled by default (or Linode disabled it).

Solution for you until you get an official response: compile your own SquashFS-enabled kernel and load it with pvgrub.

It sounds like you don't need a squashfs root, so you might also be able to just build it as a module against the stock linode kernel.

While having a custom kernel (or rebuilding the module each time a kernel is upgraded) is somewhat of a hassle, thanks for the suggestions.

Seems that I didn't dig deep enough on how to run custom kernels on linode, but I found the relevant docs on pvgrub in the library.