Re: [Qemu-devel] Emulation: Building solid files

[Markus Hitter]

Am 27.06.2007 um 00:22 schrieb NetAudi:

> Building virtual machines taking only one big binary file (merging  
> Qemu
> engine and HD image file). It could be good for future portable  
> aplications.
> I thought this because I'm triying to do the simplest-ultra-secure  
> Internet
> navigatior. The idea is to generate a VM (with the lightest/ 
> functional O.S.
> posibility and  increase speed at top) to content a Firefox  
> installation
> (with the most used complements into it). The main is to load all  
> this VM
> into the RAM and when it will turn off, it never has to save the  
> session
> changes, it allways must start at the beginning point.

How does stuffing all virtual machine parts into one file help you to  
load a virtual machine entirely into RAM? Surely, one could manage to  
load multiple files into RAM.

Additionally, I don't see how it helps security if you move the hard  
disk for the virtual machine into RAM. It should be fully sufficient  
to let the inital hard disk sitting in the file system and to record  
changes to the virtual hard disk, only. qemu supports such recordings  
(shadowed file systems) already and if it makes you happy, it  
shouldn't be too hard to keep the record of changes in RAM. This  
saves you a lot of startup time as well als hundreds of megabytes of  
RAM.

For an approach without any changes to qemu, you could have a look  
into how (Linux) Live CDs work. Most of them work without a writeable  
hard disk, managing all the RAM-disk stuff themselves.


Markus

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Dipl. Ing. Markus Hitter
http://www.jump-ing.de/