From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1Fd6j0-0000x9-7R for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 08 May 2006 10:28:38 -0400 Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1Fd6iy-0000uu-Eb for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 08 May 2006 10:28:37 -0400 Received: from [199.232.76.173] (helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1Fd6iy-0000ui-B5 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 08 May 2006 10:28:36 -0400 Received: from [65.74.133.6] (helo=mail.codesourcery.com) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS-1.0:DHE_RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA:32) (Exim 4.52) id 1Fd6jo-0006ae-UW for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 08 May 2006 10:29:29 -0400 From: Paul Brook Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] using partition images Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 15:28:31 +0100 References: <20060508035346.GA12697@jbrown.mylinuxbox.org> <200605081411.42503.paul@codesourcery.com> <20060508141911.GA2869@jbrown.mylinuxbox.org> In-Reply-To: <20060508141911.GA2869@jbrown.mylinuxbox.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200605081528.32129.paul@codesourcery.com> Reply-To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org List-Id: qemu-devel.nongnu.org List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: "Jim C. Brown" Cc: qemu-devel@nongnu.org On Monday 08 May 2006 15:19, Jim C. Brown wrote: > On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 02:11:36PM +0100, Paul Brook wrote: > > > I'll work on this tonight. I've been thinking about doing this, since > > > it would allow one to use any qemu-supported disk image format as a > > > partition image. > > > > > > I can't think of any disk format that's heavily used in qemu that is > > > normally used for partition images except for raw. OTOH it might be > > > interesting to have qcow partition images. > > > > If done properly this should also allow use of vmware split image files. > > It'd probably be easier to fix the vmdk driver to handle these natively. > > If split vmdks are just a series of partition images plus an image of an > MBR/partition table then it may be possible to hack this up via a partition > driver that supported harddisk sharing (using multiple partition images as > part of the same hard disk). I think you should be aiming for a generic composite device block driver. Then write a fake MBR block device (or whatever you want to call it). To use a single partition you create a composite device consisting of the fake mbr and the raw partition. A vmware split image file is just a composite of several raw images with a funny config file. Paul