This is in reply to a question on IRC about opening compressed disk
images.
This is already possible -- in fact quite easy -- using nbdkit.
It only works well for xz-compressed files which have been prepared
using the --block-size option like this:
xz --best --block-size=16777216 disk.img
You can then run nbdkit as a captive process like this:
nbdkit xz file=disk.img.xz \
--run 'guestfish --format=raw -a $nbd -i'
or if you feel like it, boot the guest:
nbdkit xz file=disk.img.xz \
--run 'qemu-kvm -m 1024 -drive file=$nbd,if=virtio'
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
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