Mounting/loopback a huge gzipped dd image on the fly?

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Hello :wave:

I was searching for a long time, but can’t find a suitable tool to do this. Only that i should create a SQUASHFS or use AVFS.

I create images like that:

dd if=/dev/sda | pigz -9 - | ssh user@local dd of=image.gz status=progress bs=64k

Avfs works somehow, but it is really slow on an 300GB image that is compressed to 80GB.

Is there any alternative to AVFS that works faster?

I am not searching for “Egg-laying wool-milk sow”, but just a tool that decompress gzip files at a decent speed on the fly.

Any ideas?

Thanks for advice :slight_smile:

1 Like
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I’m unfamiliar with AVFS but have used squashfs before however:

gzip is a sequentially oriented archive (just like tarball files) so you will never get a decent speed for random-access from a sequential access medium.

What you’re trying to do is to change your HDD by a tape drive and then asking how to get better performance on said tape drive similar to a HDD.

So:

Yeah:

  1. Don’t do that!
    OR
  2. Live with it knowing its limitations.
    :man_shrugging: :sob:
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