For fast and efficient compression/decompression, you can use the deflate and inflator utilities, which rely on popular deflate/inflate algorithms.
The deflate algorithm combines two algorithms. The first takes care of removing data duplication in files; the second algorithm handles data sequences that appear the most often by giving them shorter symbols. Those two algorithms provide excellent lossless compression of data and executable files. The inflate algorithm simply reverses what the deflate algorithm does.
The deflate utility is intended for use with the filter attribute for mkefs. You can also use it to precompress files intended for a flash filesystem.
The inflator resource manager sits in front of the other filesystems that were previously compressed using the deflate utility. It can almost double the effective size of the flash memory.
Compressed files can be manipulated with standard utilities such as cp or ftp—they can display their compressed and uncompressed size with the ls utility if used with the proper mountpoint. These features make the management of a compressed flash filesystem seamless to a systems designer.