[ANNOUNCE] erofs-utils: release 1.7

From: Gao Xiang
Date: Thu Sep 21 2023 - 13:22:29 EST


Hi folks,

After almost another 6 months, a new version of erofs-utils 1.7 is
available at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/xiang/erofs-utils.git tags/v1.7

It mainly includes the following changes:
 - support arbitrary valid block sizes in addition to page size;
 - (mkfs.erofs) arrange on-disk meta with Breadth-First Traversal instead;
 - support long xattr name prefixes (Jingbo Xu);
 - support UUID functionality without libuuid (Norbert Lange);
 - (mkfs.erofs, experimental) add DEFLATE algorithm support;
 - (mkfs.erofs, experimental) support building images directly from tarballs;
 - (dump.erofs) print more superblock fields (Guo Xuenan);
 - (mkfs.erofs, experimental) introduce preliminary rebuild mode (Jingbo Xu);
 - various bugfixes and cleanups (Sandeep Dhavale, Guo Xuenan, Yue Hu,
         Weizhao Ouyang, Kelvin Zhang, Noboru Asai, Yifan Zhao and Li Yiyan);

In brief, this version supports tarerofs, DEFLATE algorithm, and new
on-disk features to help the Composefs model.

In the next erofs-utils versions, we are going to improve mkfs
performance by supporting multi-threaded reproducible builds and
optimizing data deduplication & metadata flushing speed.  In addition,
other enhancements like erofsfuse improvements [1], hardware accelerator
and preliminary Zstd algorithm support are on the way too.

Comments, questions are welcome as always, yet time is still needed for
them to be landed (EROFS upstream development is a little part of our
kernel jobs).  It's always worth trying, and any contribution is much
appreciated.

Thanks,
Gao Xiang

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230918090306.2524624-1-lyy0627@xxxxxxxxxxx