This is basically a note to myself for future reference which I hope is interesting to others.
I just had to loopback mount a gzipped image file. I didn’t want, however, to unpack the file, because I am very short on disk space right now. Also, I didn’t care too much about processing power. I searched quite a bit until I found “avfs“.
AVFS is a system, which enables all programs to look inside archived or compressed files, or access remote files without recompiling the programs or changing the kernel.
At the moment it supports floppies, tar and gzip files, zip, bzip2, ar and rar files, ftp sessions, http, webdav, rsh/rcp, ssh/scp
muelli@xbox:/tmp$ avfsd -o allow_root ~/.avfs muelli@xbox:/tmp$ cd ~/.avfs/home/muelli/qemu muelli@xbox:~/.avfs/home/muelli/qemu$ sudo losetup /dev/loop1 XP-4G.ntfs.dd.gz# muelli@xbox:~/.avfs/home/muelli/qemu$ sudo mount /dev/loop1 -oro,noatime /home/muelli/empty/
Note that the filename I’m accessing is suffixed with a hash.
