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Re: [Qemu-block] [PATCH 1/1] blk: do not select PFLASH device for intern


From: Denis V. Lunev
Subject: Re: [Qemu-block] [PATCH 1/1] blk: do not select PFLASH device for internal snapshot
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 18:10:26 +0300
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.4.0

On 01/12/2016 05:16 PM, Kevin Wolf wrote:
Am 12.01.2016 um 07:03 hat Denis V. Lunev geschrieben:
There is a long-long story. OVMF VMs can not be snapsotted using
'virsh snapshot' as they have "pflash" device which is configured as
"raw" image. There was a discussion in the past about that.

Good description has been provided on topic by Laszlo Ersek, see below:

"It is true that a pflash drive is "just a drive" *internally* to QEMU.
It is also true that it more or less takes the same -drive options as
any other *disk* drive. But those facts are just implementation details.

The relevant trait of pflash storage files is that they are not *disk
images*, on the libvirt domain XML level. They are not created in
storage pools, you cannot specify their caching attributes, you don't
specify their guest-visible frontend in separation (like virtio-blk /
     virtio-scsi / pflash). Those details are hidden (on purpose).

Consequently, pflash storage files are expected to be *small* in size
(in practice: identically sized to the varstore template they are
instantiated from). They are created under /var/lib/libvirt/qemu/nvram.
Although you can edit their path in the domain XML, they are not
considered disks."

Thus we should avoid selection of "pflash" drives for VM state saving.

For now "pflash" is read-write raw image as it configured by libvirt.
Thus there are no such images in the field and we could safely disable
ability to save state to those images inside QEMU.
This is obviously broken. If you write to the pflash, then it needs to
be snapshotted in order to keep a consistent state.

If you want to avoid snapshotting the image, make it read-only and it
will be skipped even today.

Kevin
you interpret the patch a bit wrong.

It will be snapshoted once I'll raw image with qcow2 image, but this image
will not be selected for state saving, i.e. it will remain compact.

Den



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