[Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH] An alternative http protocol

[Nolan <nolan@sigbus.net>]

Alexander Graf <agraf <at> suse.de> writes:
> FWIW libcurl supports these too plus FTP and TFTP, though I haven't  
> tried it myself. The good thing about the FTP/TFTP support is that it  
> should bascially work exactly the same, so libcurl interprets the  
> "range" parameter and ends up doing "the right thing" for the  
> respective protocols.

I've poked around a bit, and it looks like libneon makes doing AIO difficult. 
Getting FTP for free is pretty compelling, and there might be a use-case for
TFTP out there somewhere.  

So I think the smart thing to do is to add a simple cache to your libcurl based
implementation.  Either the extremely simple 1 entry cache I used, or a more
clever one.  I'm happy to add it after you convert to AIO.

For the use case of booting over HTTP from an .iso file, the cache is not really
optional.  A cacheless install of debian etch from an Apache server resulted in
~60MB of log entries, and took hours.  Doing this to someone else's server is
extremely anti-social.