Artem Kachitchkine wrote: > The current backend block driver (xdb) allows block devices or raw > files (using lofi) to be exported to the guest as disks. xdb will > continue to be present and will co-exist with the block tap driver > (xpvtap). A guest may contain many disks. These disks can be a mixture > of block devices using xdb, raw files using xdb, and vmdk, vdi, and/or > raw files using xpvtap.
Why keep the existing lofi based with xdb as the default for file based disks if xpvtab can support this too ? Is it just because lofi supports compression and encryption and xpvtap doesn't or is there another reason ? This is the only part that needs to be answered for me to be happy with the architecture of this case the rest is futures. Is xdb likely to be obsoleted in the future ? I believe VMware has the capability to provide encrypted .vmdk images, is there a plan/desire for this support to be added to xpvtap in the future I'm not expecting it to be part of this case just trying to work of if the architecture of this case can support it, I believe it could providing we can get the details of how encrypted vmdk images are written. I would expect that to support encryption with xpvtab vdiskadm (PSARC/2008/597) would need updating. For VirtualBox VDI format there is an open request for adding encryption support: http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/1765 Similar comments for compression. -- Darren J Moffat
