[Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/2] Small improvements to VMDK4 file handling

[Richard W.M. Jones]

We're tracing a bug in "qemu-img convert" where it will silently fail
to convert certain types of VMDK file.  The VMDK files produced by
VMWare vSphere / ESX 4.0, which have the VMDK subformat
"streamOptimized" are one notable case:

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=548723

These two patches certainly don't fix this, but they do at least
prevent "qemu-img convert" from silently failing.

Unfortunately to do this I had to look much more deeply into the VMDK
format than the current VMDK block driver does.  We have to parse the
VMDK4 plain text descriptor which is embedded in these binary files.

So the first patch adds the parsing and has the benefit of improving
how the CID and parentCID fields are read and updated.

The second patch parses the createType field from the descriptor, and
refuses to continue if it's not on a short whitelist of subformats
which we are likely to be able to parse.

Rich.

-- 
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