[Qemu-devel] Re: Disk images

[Julien Lancien <calexicoz@gmail.com>]

> 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 ?

Ok, found the answer for this one here:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Qemu.

Sorry, I should have searched before.

> 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 ?