From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1EXNuN-0007jq-C9 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 02 Nov 2005 14:04:27 -0500 Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1EXNuL-0007i8-QO for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 02 Nov 2005 14:04:27 -0500 Received: from [199.232.76.173] (helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1EXNuL-0007i1-LT for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 02 Nov 2005 14:04:25 -0500 Received: from [64.233.184.206] (helo=wproxy.gmail.com) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.34) id 1EXNuL-0004eR-Fr for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 02 Nov 2005 14:04:25 -0500 Received: by wproxy.gmail.com with SMTP id i34so72015wra for ; Wed, 02 Nov 2005 11:02:54 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2005 14:02:54 -0500 From: Julien Lancien MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline Subject: [Qemu-devel] Disk images Reply-To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org List-Id: qemu-devel.nongnu.org List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org Hi, The user forum seems to have been down for a while, so I post my question to this mailing list. The -smd dir option allows the emulated machine to access the external world. I was wondering if there was a way to do it the other way: allow the host to access the disk image of the emulated machine. My problem is that I used virtual machine to prepare various flavor of Linux (installation, configuration), and I'ld like to make a tar image of the files once I'm finished. Currently, I boot a live cd inside the virtual machine, mount the smb dir, and then make the transfer. But it is damn slow ! Maybe there is way to get the data from the disk image directly ? A related question: which disk format offer the best performances ? I don't care much about space, but I'ld like to use some of the virtual machines as regular machines and not just for test. Talking about disk images, is there some way to defragment them ? I mean after a while, being used a lot, they probably get fragmented too (inside the disk image, not the file of the disk image). And finally my last question: imagine I create a big file in my virtual OS, and then delete it, the size of the disk image won't shrink. I guess that there are some filesystem issues there, but more generally, can a disk image shrink eventually ? Thanks for any tip, advice or help.