[Sorry for the odd quoting. I forwarded the original message from Fam
Zheng so this feature could be discussed in public. This is my reply.]
On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 05:57:12PM +0800, Fam Zheng wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> QEMU-KVM BZ 955734, and libvirt BZ 905125 are about feature "Read-only
> point-in-time throwaway snapshot". The development is ongoing on
> upstream, which implements the core functionality by QMP command
> drive-backup. I want to demonstrate the HMP/QMP commands here for image
> fleecing tasks (again) and make sure this interface looks ready and
> satisfying from Libvirt point of view.
>
> We get cheap point-in-time snapshot, and export it through built in NBD
> server, by commands described below:
>
> 1. qemu-img create -f qcow2 -o backing_file=RUNNING-VM.img BACKUP.qcow2
>
> (although the backing_file option is not honoured in the next step
> because we *override* backing file with an existing
> BlockDriverState, giving it here does no harm and also makes sure
> the created image is of right size.)
>
> 2. (HMP) drive_add backing=ide0-hd0,file=BACKUP.qcow2,id=target0,if=none
>
> (where ide0-hd0 is the running BlockDriverState name for
> RUNNING-VM.img)
>
> 3. (QMP) drive-backup device=ide0-hd0 mode=drive sync=none target=target0
>
> (NewImageMode 'drive' means target is looked up as a device id, sync
> mode 'none' means don't copy any data except copy-on-write the
> point in time snapshot data)
>
> 4. (QMP) nbd-server-add device=target0
>
> When image fleecing done:
If you want to test image inspection, an easy way is:
export LIBGUESTFS_BACKEND=direct
virt-inspector -a nbd://localhost:port [-v]
or: virt-inspector -a 'nbd://?socket=/sockpath' [-v]
Use -v for extra debug.
Note this requires libguestfs >= 1.22
(that usually means Fedora >= 19, RHEL >= 7, Debian >= unstable).
> 1. (QMP) block-job-complete device=ide0-hd0
>
> 2. (HMP) drive_del target0
>
> 3. rm BACKUP.qcow2
>
> Note: HMP drive_add/drive_del has no counterpart in QMP now but a new
> command blockdev-add to do similar things is WIP, which can be an
> alternative in QMP flavor.
>
> Any comments are welcome!
Do you have a qemu git repo with a working version of all of this
(ie. including the non-upstream-yet bits)?
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting,
bindings from many languages. http://libguestfs.org
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