Re: [PATCH v3 0/3] Dump QCOW2 metadata

[Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>]

On 2/20/20 6:28 AM, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> Am 20.02.2020 um 12:58 hat Max Reitz geschrieben:
>> On 14.01.20 09:22, Andrey Shinkevich wrote:
>>> The information about QCOW2 metadata allocations in an image ELF-file is
>>> helpful for finding issues with the image data integrity.
>>
>> Sorry that I’m replying only so late – but I don’t know why we need this
>> in qemu, and this cover letter doesn’t provide a justification.  I mean,
>> it isn’t too complex (from the diffstat), but wouldn’t it be better to
>> just have a script for this?
> 
> Specifically, we could extend tests/qemu-iotests/qcow2.py. This seems to
> be debugging output that would be in line with what the script is
> already used for.

I also just discovered GNU poke, http://jemarch.net/poke, which is an 
arbitrary binary-format editor with a fairly good example of how it can 
be used to inspect ELF files.  I'm wondering if it would be easier to 
write a pickle describing the qcow2 format that would make it easier to 
do interactive browsing/editing of a qcow2 file, at the expense of 
having to depend on poke (which has not yet hit the 1.0 release and is 
not yet bundled for Fedora).

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3226
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org