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

[Dr. David Alan Gilbert]

* Daniel P. Berrangé (address@hidden) wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 06, 2018 at 03:31:35PM +0100, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote:
> > > Not in this case because it'd still be a flat qcow2 file in a simple tar
> > > archive.
> > > 
> > > But you're right if we had a more complex format (like chunks stored in
> > > a tar file).
> > 
> > My only problem with using the tar like that is that all tools
> > everywhere would need to be updated to be able to parse them.
> 
> I feel it is the opposite actually. By adding named blobs or custom
> strings to qcow2, we've effectively invented a new type of archive
> format, except apps cant use the normal unzip/tar tools/apis they
> already have. Instead they need to use qemu-img to read,add,remove
> blobs from qcow2. It is very compelling to use an existing archive
> format like tar/zip because every language has APIs for dealing
> with them and apps probably already do this for things like OVA.

My thinking was that a qcow2 with this extra data would still work in
all our existing systems.

Dave

> Regards,
> Daniel
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Dr. David Alan Gilbert / address@hidden / Manchester, UK