On Thu, Apr 02, 2015 at 08:59:19AM +0100, Margaret Lewicka wrote: Not any time soon. I wonder why the number of patches matters? In RHEL 7.1, libguestfs ships with 103 patches -- we manage them in a git branch, which is quite simple. The appliance is already sparse: $ du -sh /var/tmp/.guestfs-1000/appliance.d/* 1.2M /var/tmp/.guestfs-1000/appliance.d/initrd 5.6M /var/tmp/.guestfs-1000/appliance.d/kernel 385M /var/tmp/.guestfs-1000/appliance.d/root If it's 4 GB for you, then it's likely that the way you're packaging it doesn't preserve sparseness. Maybe tar or xz compress it before packaging it? Unfortunately because of the way the appliance is built we cannot use a different format (eg. compressed qcow2) for it, even though that would make sense. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines. Tiny program with many powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc. http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top