QNX Neutrino provides an Inflator pass-through filesystem, which is a resource manager that sits in front of other filesystems and inflates files that were previously deflated (using the deflate utility).
The inflator utility is typically used when the underlying filesystem is a flash filesystem. Using it can almost double the effective size of the flash memory.
If a file is being opened for a read, inflator attempts to open the file itself on an underlying filesystem. It reads the first 16 bytes and checks for the signature of a deflated file. If the file was deflated, inflator places itself between the application and the underlying filesystem. All reads return the original file data before it was deflated.
From the application's point of view, the file appears to be uncompressed. Random seeks are also supported. If the application does a stat() on the file, the size of the inflated file (the original size before it was deflated) is returned.