[Qemu-devel] Re: block: format vs. protocol, and how they stack

[Kevin Wolf]

Am 21.06.2010 17:34, schrieb Anthony Liguori:
> On 06/21/2010 09:01 AM, Kevin Wolf wrote:
>>
>> No, what I'm saying is that even in your model
>>
>>    -blockdev format=qcow2,file=image.qcow2,id=blk1
>>
>> becomes qcow2 ->  file automatically, whereas
>>
>>    -blockdev format=vvfat,file=/tmp/dir/,id=blk1
>>
>> doesn't become vvfat ->  file, but stays just vvfat.
>>    
> 
> I should say, that -blockdev format= vs. -blockdev transport= is 
> definitely at a place where I don't care that much.
> 
> The things that I think are most important are:
> 
> 1) That we have structured options that map well to config file without 
> trickery to do nesting
> 2) That we don't automagically pass options through from the first layer 
> down to subsequent layers

Does this mean that you need to specify the protocol explicitly for any
non-trivial case? So if you want to use just default for everything you
can use

  -blockdev id=foo,format=qcow2,file=foo.qcow2

and it will be turned into something sensible automagically (namely
adding a file blockdev underneath and passing the file parameter to that
one), but if you want to change an option, you need to specify both?

  -blockdev id=foo,format=qcow2,parent=foo_file
  -blockdev id=foo_file,format=file,file=foo.qcow2,cache=off

What about read-only? Is it something that must be specified for each
single node in the chain to actually get the right semantics?

Kevin