On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 07:46:30PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote: > Taking the compression feature - arguably the biggest benefit of that > is when you distribute disk images. eg if someone provides a root disk > image on a web server, using compression in qcow2 can dramatically > lower the download size, while still allowing QEMU to directly run > from that qcow2 file. Sure you could wrap your disk images in gzip > and then convert to your local filesystem at time of use but this > introduces multiple extra steps.
It would be nice if qemu could handle xz-compressed files transparently, since (when prepared correctly) these files are seekable. I have written code to do this here: https://github.com/libguestfs/nbdkit/tree/master/plugins/xz Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting, bindings from many languages. http://libguestfs.org
