On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 07:51:40AM +0100, Alex Bligh wrote: > What I'm not sure of is whether the streaming format has to be written > sequentially from as opposed to random writes. I believe the way > qemu-img convert works, one can't guarantee the writes are > sequential.
It should be possible to support stream-optimized VMDK writing in qemu-img convert. The file format supports non-sequential layout of data - each piece of guest data also has a logical block address with it. You can write out the grain table/directory at the end of the image file once you know how data is layed out. The VMDK spec is not great so I guess you'll also need a VMware setup to verify your code changes. Stefan
