fuse-archive is a program that serves an archive or compressed file (e.g. foo.tar, foo.tar.gz, foo.xz or foo.zip) as a read-only FUSE file system.

It is similar to mount-zip and fuse-zip but speaks a larger range of archive or compressed file formats.

It is similar to archivemount but can be much faster (see the Performance section below) although it can only mount read-only, not read-write.

$ git clone https://github.com/google/fuse-archive.git
$ cd fuse-archive
$ make

On a Debian system, you may first need to install some dependencies:

$ sudo apt install libarchive-dev libfuse-dev

Create a single .tar.gz file that is 256 MiB decompressed and 255 KiB compressed (the file just contains repeated 0x00 NUL bytes):

$ truncate --size=256M zeroes
$ tar cfz zeroes-256mib.tar.gz zeroes

Create a mnt directory:

$ mkdir mnt

fuse-archive timings:

$ time fuse-archive zeroes-256mib.tar.gz mnt
real    0m0.443s

$ dd if=mnt/zeroes of=/dev/null status=progress
524288+0 records in
524288+0 records out
268435456 bytes (268 MB, 256 MiB) copied, 0.836048 s, 321 MB/s

$ fusermount -u mnt

archivemount timings:

$ time archivemount zeroes-256mib.tar.gz mnt
real    0m0.581s

$ dd if=mnt/zeroes of=/dev/null status=progress
268288512 bytes (268 MB, 256 MiB) copied, 569 s, 471 kB/s
524288+0 records in
524288+0 records out
268435456 bytes (268 MB, 256 MiB) copied, 570.146 s, 471 kB/s

$ fusermount -u mnt

Here, fuse-archive takes about the same time to scan the archive, bind the mountpoint and daemonize, but it is ~700× faster (0.83s vs 570s) to copy out the decompressed contents. This is because fuse-archive does not use archivemount's quadratic complexity algorithm.

This is not an official Google product. It is just code that happens to be owned by Google.

Updated on May 2022.