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 Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows programs, test, and build Windows installers. Over 100 libraries supported. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW