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Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC] qed: Add QEMU Enhanced Disk format


From: Anthony Liguori
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC] qed: Add QEMU Enhanced Disk format
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 12:10:02 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.11) Gecko/20100713 Lightning/1.0b1 Thunderbird/3.0.6

On 09/10/2010 11:05 AM, Kevin Wolf wrote:
Am 10.09.2010 17:53, schrieb Anthony Liguori:
On 09/10/2010 10:18 AM, Kevin Wolf wrote:
Am 10.09.2010 17:02, schrieb Anthony Liguori:

What makes us future proof is having a good feature support.  qcow2
doesn't have this.  We have a good way at making purely informational
changes and also making changes that break the format.  Those features
are independent so they can be backported in a compatible way too.

I might have agreed that it's useful to be able to backport them
independently if we had had lots of such features added in the past. But
we haven't.

I think part of why we haven't had them is that the mechanisms aren't
very flexible.

A good example of where feature support would be very nice is for
changing the way snapshots metadata is recorded in qcow2.

It would be nice to be able to represent snapshots with a uuid.  If you
added new metadata that had uuid based snapshots that were hierarchical
and added a feature bit, it would have some nice properties.

Since most images don't have snapshots, the common case would be a qcow2
that was fully backwards compatible.  You would also get a graceful
failure for using a new image with an old QEMU.
Well, snapshots have an ID today (which is different from their name).
Nobody stops you from putting a UUID there. Fully backwards compatible,
no feature flag needed. I think Miguel was planning to actually do this.

The problem is that management tools have to make a decision about what to do with ID's that aren't UUIDs which means that in our management interface, we can't just expose UUIDs but instead we have to expose strings that may sometimes be UUIDs.

I don't think it buys us a lot to get the backwards compatibility.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

Kevin




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