Why does WIM take so long to mount?

Comments, questions, bug reports, etc.
Post Reply
tomjones
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2021 3:43 pm

Why does WIM take so long to mount?

Post by tomjones »

I am trying to use WIM as a substitute for Squashfs on Windows. It doesn't appear like wimlib offers a mount command for Windows, but DISM does.

What I don't understand is that I can mount a Squashfs image with Squashfuse instantaneously, but trying to mount a WIM image containing the same data with DISM takes 10+ minutes. There's an /Optimize parameter on DISM /Mount-Image that brings the mount time down significantly but you still end up paying the cost when you go to access the data.

Is there something inherent with the WIM format that makes mounting so slow? I haven't tried wimmount on Linux yet and perhaps that doesn't suffer from the same long mount times as DISM? If so, has any thought been put into porting wimmount to Windows with something like Dokany?
tomjones
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2021 3:43 pm

Re: Why does WIM take so long to mount?

Post by tomjones »

Just tried wimmount on Linux and it appears to be instantaneous. I guess this has to do with whatever DISM /Mount-Image is doing.
synchronicity
Site Admin
Posts: 472
Joined: Sun Aug 02, 2015 10:31 pm

Re: Why does WIM take so long to mount?

Post by synchronicity »

I don't know why DISM takes so long to mount WIM images; it's not something that I've looked into. There's nothing inherent in the WIM file format that makes mounting take a long time.

I don't have any plans to support WIM mounting on Windows.
Post Reply