From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1KNffL-0000wT-KE for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:14:23 -0400 Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1KNffK-0000vc-23 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:14:23 -0400 Received: from [199.232.76.173] (port=46993 helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1KNffJ-0000vX-Ph for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:14:21 -0400 Received: from an-out-0708.google.com ([209.85.132.245]:11749) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1KNffJ-00008B-PJ for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:14:21 -0400 Received: by an-out-0708.google.com with SMTP id d18so1753714and.130 for ; Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:14:20 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <488E8AE8.2060602@codemonkey.ws> Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:13:44 -0500 From: Anthony Liguori MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] qcow3 - arbitrary metadata References: <488E2752.7030008@codemonkey.ws> <20080729014939.GA27149@shareable.org> In-Reply-To: <20080729014939.GA27149@shareable.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Reply-To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org List-Id: qemu-devel.nongnu.org List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org Jamie Lokier wrote: > Anthony Liguori wrote: > >> Can you provide more information about what the metadata is used for and >> why it's so important for the metadata to be in the image verses in a >> separate file? >> > > Yeah, I have the opposite problem - too much in the same file :-) > > I want to be able to savevm, but some of my VMs don't have any qcow2 > images (because I don't trust them for mission-critical VMs since > recent discussion, How do you snapshot the disk images? > or because they are floppy-only or CD-only VMs with > no hard disk). > > To enable savevm, at least according to docs, I have to have a qcow2 > image somewhere. So I add a redundant minimum-size unpartitioned > qcow2 hard disk and hope nobody minds... > > That seems a bit hackish. It would be nice if savevm could just write > to a named file and loadvm could read it. > I'm in the process of cleaning up the live migration code from KVM for QEMU. It works quite happily right now, I'm just reorganizing some things. In the process, I hope to introduce a checkpoint command which provides a live snapshotting mechanism. I think there is certainly room for discussion about whether you should be able to snapshot/savevm to a file besides snapshotting to a qcow2 file. I think snapshotting to a pipe is actually a really interesting use-case myself for a variety of applications. Regards, Anthony Liguori > -- Jamie > > >