Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Add HTTP protocol using curl v2

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Wed, May 06, 2009 at 03:00:50AM +0200, alex@csgraf.de wrote:
> From: Alexander Graf <alex@csgraf.de>
> 
> Currently Qemu can read from posix I/O and NBD. This patch adds a
> third protocol to the game: HTTP.
> 
> In certain situations it can be useful to access HTTP data directly,
> for example if you want to try out an http provided OS image, but
> don't know if you want to download it yet.
> 
> Using this patch you can now try it on on the fly. Just use it like:
> 
> qemu -cdrom http://host/path/my.iso

I rather think there should be an explicit flag to allow use of http://
URLs in filenames at runtime, not just 'configure' time. There are many
apps out there using QEMU which will be assuming QEMU treats all disk
paths as local files, and thus not got explicit code to check whether 
a URI is passed. I could well see that some will consider it a security
issue to allow QEMU to download off the net, but if they updated to
a new QEMU with this patch, downloading would be allowed by default.

Perhaps only enable these remote URIs with the -drive parameter, when
an explicit fmt=http option is set. But can this be layered into the
other protocols, eg could the remote URI be in qcow, vmdk, etc formats,
or are you assuming the remote uri is raw file ?

Daniel
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