Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: NBD server for QEMU images

[Paul Brook]

On Tuesday 12 December 2006 17:00, Salvador Fandino wrote:
> Martin Guy wrote:
> >> The patch available from http://qemu-forum.ipi.fi/viewtopic.php?t=2718
> >> adds a new utility, qemu-nbds, that implements a NBD server
> >
> > I have been using nbd volumes mounted from inside qemu for filestore
> > and for swap, both read-write, served from files and from partitions,
> > with the unmodified standard nbd-server (debian testing version) for
> > intensive work and it has been faster and more reliable than NFS (not
> > that that's saying much).
> >
> > The only thing that doesn't work is the -swap option, which just
> > hangs, but that proves not to be necessary when swapping onto nbd host
> > volume from qemu-land, even when stress-testing it.
> >
> > What problem is solved by a specially modified nbd server?
>
> It serves disk images in any format QEMU can handle, for instance, qcow
> images.
>
> It's mostly intended to be used for accessing the files inside QEMU disk
> images locally, without having to launch a virtual machine and accessing
> then from there.

mount -o loop does this.

Paul