New Slax Releases Make Persistent Changes Up to 10 Times Faster with DynFileFS

Slax creator Tomas Matejicek announced today the general availability of two new versions of its minimalist distribution that promises a brand-new file system for persistent storage with the latest DynFileFS release.

Slax 15.0.1 and Slax 11.6.0 are now available based on Slackware-current and Debian GNU/Linux 11.6 “Bullseye” respectively. The biggest change in these releases is the use of the newest DynFileFS FUSE file system for dynamically-enlarged files to store persistent changes on the bootable media.

DynFileFS is written by Tomas Matejicek himself, but the new release received a performance boost, and thanks to the use of a new file format, promises up to 10 times faster persistent changes, especially when storing a lot of data on the persistent disk.

“How does it work? Simply said, it provides a virtual file called “virtual.dat” after mounting it to some directory. This file can be of any specified size, like 30GB, but it does not need to pre-allocate this huge amount of disk space on mount. All changes made to this virtual file are stored in an indexed storage in a different file on disk,” explains Tomas Matejicek in a blog post.

Apart from this major new feature, the new Slax releases include updated packages from the upstream repositories, as well as a new guide to help you choose which Slax version is right for you. Keep in mind that the new DynFileFS 3.0 file system has been implemented in both Slax releases.

You can download the Slackware-based Slax 15.0.1 or the Debian-based Slax 11.6.0 right now from the official website. Both versions are available for 64-bit or 32-bit architectures.

Last updated 8 months ago