Tiny Core Extensions > TCE Q&A Forum

TCE versus TCZ

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kagashe:
I have built a very small extension fbxkb.tce which is only 44 KB. When I converted it to .tcz using tce2tcz script the size of fbxkb.tcz was 548 KB.

First question is why this is so?
Second is whether loading tce rather tcz would be more efficient from RAM usage point of view?

kagashe

curaga:
iso9660 - the filesystem used on cd's and also in tcz - has an overhead of 300kb. It also saves more attributes of the files than tar.

Using tcz is only ram-efficient when they are not in RAM themselves; if they are for example on a hd or usb stick. That's because they are mounted instead of extracted.

Jason W:
the tce2tcz script uses zisofs which adds about 300kb or more of size to small extensions.  Using cramfs will result in only a slightly larger sized extension if they are small:

mkdir pkg
tar xzvf extension.tce -C pkg
mkfs.cramfs pkg extension.tcz

Be sure to have the cramfs-utils extension loaded to use cramfs if you decide to use that.

Tcz is almost always more ram efficient than tce since with tcz the package exists in RAM only as symlinks, aside from what may be in the user.tar.gz if one was used.

JW

I see curaga's post above while I was typing, but tcz's that are mounted on RAM still save some memory as they only take up the space of the tcz itself rather than the size of the unpacked extension.

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