On 2018-05-29 08:44, Kevin Wolf wrote: > Am 28.05.2018 um 23:25 hat Richard W.M. Jones geschrieben: >> On Mon, May 28, 2018 at 10:20:54PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: >>> On Mon, May 28, 2018 at 08:38:33PM +0200, Kevin Wolf wrote: >>>> Just accessing the image file within a tar archive is possible and we >>>> could write a block driver for that (I actually think we should do >>>> this), but it restricts you because certain operations like resizing >>>> aren't really possible in tar. Unfortunately, resizing is a really >>>> common operation for non-raw image formats. >>> >>> We do this already in virt-v2v (using file.offset and file.size >>> parameters in the raw driver). >>> >>> For virt-v2v we only need to read the source so resizing isn't an >>> issue. For most of the cases we're talking about the downloaded image >>> would also be a template / base image, so I suppose only reading would >>> be required too. >>> >>> I also wrote an nbdkit tar file driver (supports writes, but not >>> resizing). >>> https://manpages.debian.org/testing/nbdkit-plugin-perl/nbdkit-tar-plugin.1.en.html >> >> I should add the other thorny issue with OVA files is that the >> metadata contains a checksum (SHA1 or SHA256) of the disk images. If >> you modify the disk images in-place in the tar file then you need to >> recalculate those. > > All of this means that OVA isn't really well suited to be used as a > native format for VM configuration + images. It's just for sharing > read-only images that are converted into another native format before > they are used. > > Which is probably fair for the use case it was made for, but means that > we need something else to solve our problem.
Maybe we should first narrow down our problem. Maybe you have done that already, but I'm quite in the dark still. The original problem was that you need to supply a machine type to qemu, and that multiple common architectures now have multiple machine types and not necessarily all work with a single image. So far so good, but I have two issues here already: (1) How is qemu supposed to interpret that information? If it's stored in the image file, I don't see a nice way of retrieving it before the machine is initialized, at least not with qemu's current architecture. Once we support configuring qemu solely through QMP, sure, you can do a blockdev-add and then build the machine accordingly. But that is not here today, and I'm not sure this is a good idea either, because that would mean automagic defaults for the machine-building QMP commands derived from the blockdev-add earlier, which should get a plain "No". Also, having to use QMP to build your machine wouldn't make anything easier; at least not easier than just supplying a configuration file along with the image. (Building the magic into -blockdev might be less horrible, but such magic (adding block devices influences machine defaults) to me still doesn't seem worth not having to supply a config file along with the disk image.) (2) Again, I personally just really don't like saving such information in a disk image. One actual argument I can bring up for that distaste is this: Suppose, you have multiple images attached to your VM. Now the VM wants to store the machine type. Where does it go? Into all of them? But some of those images may only contain data and might be intended to be shared between multiple VMs. So those shouldn't receive the mark. Only disks with binaries should receive them. But what if those binaries are just cross-compiled binaries for some other VM? Oh no, so not even binaries are a sure indicator... So I have no idea where the information is supposed to be stored. In any case, "the first image" just gets an outright "no" from me, and "all images" gets an "I don't think this is a good idea". Loading is fun, too. OK, so you attach multiple disk images to a VM. Oops, they have varying machine type information... Now what? Use the information from the first one? Definitely no. Just ignore all of the information in such a case and have the user supply the machine type again? Possible, but it seems weird to me that qemu would usually guess the machine type, but once you attach some random other image to it, it suddenly fails to do that. But maybe it's just me who thinks this is weird. OK, so let's go a step further. We have stored the machine type information in order to not have to supply a config file with the qcow2 image -- because if we did, it could just contain the machine type and that would be it. So to me it follows naturally that just storing the machine type doesn't make much sense if we cannot also store more VM configuration in a qcow2 file, because I don't see why you should be able to ship an image without a config file only if all you need to supply is a machine type. Often, you also need to supply how much memory the VM needs (which depends on the OS on the image) or what storage controller to use (does the OS have virtio drivers? (to be fair, it usually does, because you're supplying a VM image in the first place)). So I think if we decide to store the machine type, that is kind of a slippery slope and then there are good arguments for storing even more configuration options in the file, too. But I really, really don't like that. For one thing, I suspect it to get really ugly implementation-wise. Getting the machine type out of a disk image and actually interpreting it automatically is bad enough, but getting possibly everything out of it? It's not going to be any better. For another, how do we store the data? key-value seems wrong if we want to store everything. JSON might be fine. But eventually we just want basically a qemu configuration file in there, I would think (which may support JSON at some point?). So basically we would store the data as a binary blob and let the rest of qemu do its thing with it. But then please tell me why I fought so valiantly against storing random bitmaps in qcow2 files. I hate the idea of making qcow2 a random archive format. We have tar for that. Unless I have got something terribly wrong (which is indeed a possibility!), to me this proposal means basically to turn qcow2 into (1) a VM description format for qemu, and (2) to turn it into an archive format on the way. As explained, I don't like (2), but it would be necessary for (1), so yeah. As for (1), just why? I mean, if we want to do that, fine, but on one hand that is absolutely not what qcow2 is right now (it is a VM-agnostic disk image format), and on the other I simply don't see any good reason to. We have config files for that, they just lack the disk data. I don't see the difficulty in having to deal with two files. And even if it were too difficult for some people in some cases (to me this is really hypothetically speaking), I'd rather integrate qcow2 (or any disk image) into some other descriptive format than adding descriptive capabilities to qcow2.[1] tl;dr: I really don't get why it's so hard to supply a config file along with a qcow2 image. Is it so hard for people to realize that a VM does not only consist of a disk? Max [1] It isn't like I think integrating disk images into a VM description format (like config files) is worth doing. I think having to deal with multiple files is not an issue whatsoever (but again, this may be because I haven't understood the problem). I just think that (1) it doesn't concern me as someone working on the block layer, because it wouldn't change anything about qcow2 or the block layer in general, so go ahead if you want to do anything in an area that doesn't concern me, and (2) it just seems intuitively more natural to me and I think it would be much nicer to implement. So if someone has time to spare to implement this, I wouldn't oppose it. But I'm not that someone.
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