From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1EXOMe-0001E5-HG for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 02 Nov 2005 14:33:40 -0500 Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1EXOMd-0001Dc-26 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 02 Nov 2005 14:33:40 -0500 Received: from [199.232.76.173] (helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1EXOMc-0001DT-TG for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 02 Nov 2005 14:33:38 -0500 Received: from [64.233.184.196] (helo=wproxy.gmail.com) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.34) id 1EXOMc-00075D-VK for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 02 Nov 2005 14:33:39 -0500 Received: by wproxy.gmail.com with SMTP id i22so77442wra for ; Wed, 02 Nov 2005 11:33:38 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2005 14:33:38 -0500 From: Julien Lancien In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline References: Subject: [Qemu-devel] Re: 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 > 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 ?