[Qemu-devel] new block layer

[Fabrice Bellard <fabrice@bellard.org>]

Hi,

I commited the new disk image layer of QEMU which adds the following 
features:

- new disk image formats are easier to support

- new 'qcow' image format which supports:
     * empty sector compression even if the filesystem does not support 
holes (useful for Windows users)
     * zlib based compression to directly use compressed disk images 
(note: the written sectors are not compressed again, you must use 
qemu-img to compress a disk image).
     * AES based encryption

- native VMware 3 and 4 read-only disk image support (untested - I need 
such images to test it).

- new 'all-in-one' tool 'qemu-img' to create, convert, compress and 
encrypt disk images with all the supported formats.

Note: the qcow disk image format may change without notice until the 
next release.

Fabrice.