Re: [Qemu-devel] disk image: self-organized format or raw file

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 07:46:30PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> Taking the compression feature - arguably the biggest benefit of that
> is when you distribute disk images. eg if someone provides a root disk
> image on a web server, using compression in qcow2 can dramatically
> lower the download size, while still allowing QEMU to directly run
> from that qcow2 file. Sure you could wrap your disk images in gzip
> and then convert to your local filesystem at time of use but this
> introduces multiple extra steps.

It would be nice if qemu could handle xz-compressed files
transparently, since (when prepared correctly) these files are
seekable.

I have written code to do this here:

  https://github.com/libguestfs/nbdkit/tree/master/plugins/xz

Rich.

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Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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