Storing command line options in images

Jorge Lucángeli Obes
2007-08-10T04:55:25Z

Hi all,

>From what I've gathered, it seems that we have basically four options
at hand. I think it's important to notice, however, that whatever
comes out of this will probably be, as Avi said, a "low-end" solution.
IMHO there's room to have both the high-end libvirt-like approach, and
the "shell replacer" approach.

So let's see:

1- We could go the way of the patches I've posted, adding the comments
everyone's made.
1a- It's a good idea to actively signal QEMU to read command line
options from the image file, and not have it on by default.
1b- As Avi said, there are many guest-related options that would be
good to store _somewhere_. The user always has the option of using
qemu-img to review the options that the VM is going to use. I think
that having a "valid" set of options that the user can store will
complicate things too much.

2- We could bump qcow's version number and add command line options as
"first-class citizens" of the image world.
2a- As Anthony suggested, it could be a good starting point to make
sure these version transition happen in a smoother way.

3- We could add command line options as plain text in the image
itself. Sounds (to me) risky and not very user friendly.

4- We could have configuration files associated with the host and guests.
4a- Embedded XML.
4b- Separate files.

What do you guys think? I'm partial to 1 or 2. Since the beginning my
approach was that of a simple solution for a simple feature.

Cheers,
Jorge