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Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2011 05:29:11 +0100
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From: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] VMDK development plan for Summer of Code 2011
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To: Fam Zheng <famcool@gmail.com>
Cc: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>, qemu-devel@nongnu.org

On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 2:19 PM, Fam Zheng <famcool@gmail.com> wrote:
> As a project of Google Summer of Code 2011, I'm now working on
> improving VMDK image support. There are many subformats of VMDK
> virtual disk, some of which have separate descriptor file and others
> don't, some allocate space at once and some others grow dynamically,
> some have optional data compression. The current support of VMDK
> format is very limited, i.e. qemu now supports single file images, but
> couldn't recognize the widely used multi-file types. We have planned
> to add such support to VMDK block driver and enable more image types,
> and the working timeline is set in weeks (#1 to #7) as:
>
> [#1] Monolithic flat layout support
> [#2] Implement compression and Stream-Optimized Compressed Sparse
> Extents support.
> [#3] Improve ESX Server Sparse Extents support.
> [#4] Debug and test. Collect virtual disks with various versions and
> options, test qemu-img with them. By now some patches may be ready to
> deliver.
> [#5, 6] Add multi-file support (2GB extent formats)
> [#7] Clean up and midterm evaluation.

Thanks to Fam's work, we'll hopefully support the latest real-world
VMDK files in qemu-img convert within the next few months.

If anyone has had particular VMDK "problem files" which qemu-img
cannot handle, please reply, they would make interesting test cases.

Stefan