On 05/29/2018 04:18 PM, Nir Soffer wrote:
You CAN get a logically collapsed view of storage (that is, what the
guest would see), by using an NBD export of volume V. Reading from that
volume will then pull sectors from whichever portion of the chain you
need. You can use either qemu-nbd (if no guest is writing to the
chain), or within a running qemu, you can use nbd-server-start and
nbd-server-add (over QMP) to get such an NBD server running.
NBD expose the guest data, but we want the qcow2 stream - without
creating a new image.
NBD can do both. You choose whether it exposes the guest data or the
qcow2 data, by whether the client or the server is interpreting qcow2
data. Visually, if everything is local, qemu normally needs only two
block layer entries:
qcow2 format layer => file protocol layer
But you can also make qemu use four block layer entries, since the raw
layer is a normally passthrough layer (unless you are also using it for
it's ability to support an offset within a larger file, such as reading
from a tar file):
raw format layer => qcow2 format layer => raw format layer => file
protocol layer
Then when you introduce NBD into the picture, you have the choice of
WHERE in the four-layer system. The usual choice is:
NBD server using -f qcow2, client using -f raw:
raw format => NBD client protocol => (raw bytes) => NBD server => qcow2
format => raw format => file protocol
(simplified to
raw format => NBD client protocol => (raw bytes) => NBD server => qcow2
format => file protocol)
But an alternative choice is:
NBD server using -f raw, client using -f qcow2:
raw format => qcow2 format => NBD client protocol => (qcow2 bytes) =>
NBD server => raw format => file protocol
(simplified to
qcow2 format => NBD client protocol => (qcow2 bytes) => NBD server =>
raw format => file protocol)
--
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization: qemu.org | libvirt.org
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