Control: tags -1 + wontfix Hi Benjamin,
On Fri, Jun 26, 2026 at 12:43:34AM +0200, Benjamin Drung wrote: > It would be nice if debefivm-create and debvm-create could create qcow2 > images in addition to raw images, e.g. by calling > > qemu-img convert "$raw_image" -O qcow2 "$IMAGE" > > at the end. This request comes up repeatedly and I keep turning it down. Consider providing a PoC if you really want it. The images created by debvm-create cannot be used for much beyond passing them to debvm-run, because they do not contain a boot loader. Thus the first step here would be making debvm-run support dealing with qcow2 images. That in turn comes down to making debugfs (from e2fsprogs) work with qcow2 images. That's beyond what I'm up to and I don't feel like asking Ted Ts'o for implementing it. So as long as debugfs doesn't do qcow2, I'll be turning down this kind of request. Last time this came up, debefivm-create did not exist. That is different now. Images created by debefivm-create can be run via debefivm-run, but also have uses beyond. Still, I think that debefivm-run should be able to handle images produced by debefivm-create and this comes down to making fdisk work with qcow2 images. Again, I do not feell like asking Karel Zak about implementing it. For that reason, I am also turning down this one. In both cases, there is a noticable performance penalty arising from the conversion. debvm otherwise tries hard to minimize disk writes. Both creation scripts create the image in-place and moving to qcow2 would be a departure from that. The lack of this feature also is not very problematic. You may just invoke qemu-img after debvm. The loss of functionality is minimal here. To the contrary, the explicit conversion makes it clear that the qcow2 image is not created in-place. Bottom line, I am not going to work on this. The way to move this forward is to provide ways around the fundamental issues listed here. Helmut
