Re: [Qemu-block] [Qemu-devel] storing machine data in qcow images?

[Eduardo Habkost]

On Tue, May 22, 2018 at 05:02:21PM +0200, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> Am 22.05.2018 um 16:19 hat Michael S. Tsirkin geschrieben:
> > On Tue, May 22, 2018 at 09:35:55AM +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> > >   Hi,
> > > 
> > > > You must /sometimes/ supply the correct machine type.
> > > > 
> > > > It is quite dependent on the guest OS you have installed, and even
> > > > just how the guest OS is configured.  In general Linux is very
> > > > flexible and can adapt to a wide range of hardware, automatically
> > > > detecting things as needed. It is possible for a sysadmin to build
> > > > a Linux image in a way that would only work with I440FX, but I
> > > > don't think it would be common to see that.
> > > 
> > > I think it would be pretty hard to actually build such an image.
> > > 
> > > The more critical thing for linux guests is the storage driver which
> > > must be included into the initrd so the image can mount the root
> > > filesystem.  And the firmware, bios vs. uefi is more critical than
> > > pc vs. q35.
> > 
> > I think we can start by finding a location to embed a string in a qcow
> > image, add ability for qemu-img to set and get this string.  We can
> > discuss how it's formatted separately.
> 
> If we want it, we'll find a place to store it.
> 
> But the first thing we need is a spec for what's actually in it. Just
> storing a machine type hint would be a one-off hack that wouldn't last
> very long before we want to add the next thing.
> 
> Essentially, what we need is a description of the virtual machine that
> we suggest to use with this image. We can try to reuse something
> existing there, like libvirt XML or OVF, or invent something new (a JSON
> array describing runtime options?). One difference to existing formats
> is probably that we want only frontends and no backends in the
> description.

The OVF virtual hardware description might be appropriate to
define what's required vs what's recommended, to support multiple
machine-types, and ranges of valid values for variables.

Pro: management software can reuse exactly the same logic for
qcow2 machine descriptions and OVF machine descriptions.

Con: OVF is a pretty complex specification.

-- 
Eduardo