raw-efi disk compression option

[jamesla]

I've noticed that when generating a raw-efi disk of say 200GB it actually uses 200GB of disk space (even though I there is actually 190GB free).

Is there a way to compress the disk so that a (mostly empty) 200GB disk image doesn't actually use 200GB of disk space on the host?

So say it has actually used 10GB with 190GB free it would use 10GB of space and grow as the image used more - not sure what the name for this is.

[phaer]

The term you are looking for is "sparse image files", but those are not supported with raw images . You could use qcow-efi. Or store the image files on a file system that supports transparent compression (i.e. zfs)