LinuxBIOS Archiver: lar
-----------------------

TOC
- Introduction
- Usage
- Archive format
- TODO
- ChangeLog

Introduction
------------

This is a simple archiver, similar to cpio, ar or tar.

Design goals were
 - minimum overhead
 - maximum fault tolerance
 - simplicity

For a usage example see example.c

For questions contact Stefan Reinauer <stepan@coresystems.de>

Usage
-----

Create archive archive.lar containting files file1 ... fileN

  $ lar c archive.lar file1 ... fileN


Extract files from archive.lar

  $ lar x archive.lar [file1 .. fileN]

List files in archive:

  $ lar l archive.lar


Archive format
--------------

The rough format is:

 |--------------|
 |  header      |
 |--------------|
 |  data        |
 |--------------|
 |  header      |
 |--------------|
 |  data        |
 |--------------|
  ...

Headers have to be 16 byte aligned.

 |--------------------|
 |  magic (8byte)     |
 |--------------------|
 |  length (4byte)    |
 |--------------------|
 |  checksum (4byte)  |
 |--------------------|
 | offset to blob (4b)|
 |--------------------|
 | "path name"        | <-- null terminated, aligned to 16b
 |--------------------|
 | blob (aligned 16b) |
 |--------------------|


TODO
----

* reading flash layouts
* This does not enforce any alignment yet
* Alignment enforcing will be optional.


ChangeLog

2006/10/9
 - inital version