libarchive VS fpart

29. October 2021 At this point Jia Tan pops up, and the first thing we see from him is an innocuous patch to the xz repository, and while a lot of people believe he started out trying his luck with another library also known as libarchive, this is not the case, I would bet it’s more of a backup looking at the dates, being that there are a few days in between as shown in this commit.

Potentially malicious commit by same author on libarchive: https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/pull/1609

Full agreement, and with the addition of xpk¹/xfd² as natural extensions to that extensibility too. I see things like xfd supporting xz¹, and I'm simultaneously amazed that it exists and happy that I don't need to do xz {,de}compression on 68k ;)

I guess we have something similar-ish with libarchive⁴, but nobody(including me) has pushed the extra mile to get file dialogs to support random compression and decompression formats.

Beyond OT: I didn't realise how much stuff was still going on at aminet, but I love love LOVE that people are still dropping new car sets for Geoff Crammond's F1GP.

¹ http://aminet.net/package/util/pack/xpk_User

² http://aminet.net/package/util/pack/xfdmaster

³ http://aminet.net/package/util/pack/xfd_lzma.lha

⁴ https://www.libarchive.org/

I don't have a preview channel install handy to check, but apparently they're using libarchive so here's the full list assuming they expose everything it supports:

https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/wiki/LibarchiveForm...

As announced at the Build conference back in May, this build adds native support for reading additional archive file formats using the libarchive open-source project such as

LibarchiveFormats · libarchive/libarchive Wiki · GitHub

Seems what they're using is BSD-liscensed: https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/wiki

Native rsync is terrible for lots of small file as it copies each file one by one sequentially. If you have lots of cores to work with, use the fpsync utility that comes with the fpart command to run parallel rsync's. You can easily saturate a 10Gb link with multiple rsync processes in parallel

You should probably use something like fpsync and multiple rsync jobs to get the most bandwidth.

My favorite free solution is fpsync/fpart from https://github.com/martymac/fpart -- basically that is a highly optimized filesystem crawler and indexer that can spit out balanced lists of files to transfer to a waiting army of parallel rsync workers. Tools are provided to manage the rsync fleet. Combining fpsync/fpart with an army of parallel rsync workers is a great design pattern especially for HPC as you can farm the rsync workers out to compute nodes

I've migrated data from our Isilon to zfs hostA using the fpsync tool that comes with the fpart utility. I get reasonably good throughput from this. 15TB in 5 and 1/2 hours