Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] blktap: qcow2 image format support

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 10:07:14AM +0100, Christoph Egger wrote:
> On Thursday 21 February 2008 09:57:48 Keir Fraser wrote:
> > On 21/2/08 08:49, "Kevin Wolf" <kwolf@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > This patch adds support for the qcow2 image format to blktap. It
> > > consists mostly of qemu code, adapted to the blktap interfaces.
> > > Snapshots and compressed images are supported.
> > >
> > > The qcow2 driver may be used by either specifying tap:qcow2 or by using
> > > tap:qcow which will detect that you have a version 2 image and will call
> > > the qcow2 driver.
> >
> > Is qcow2 so different from qcow1 that it really needs its own backend
> > driver?
> 
> IMO, _all_ blktap drivers need some code refactoring. There is a lot of
> duplicated code across all drivers
> that can be moved into a blktap/drivers/blk-common.c.

Well if you're concerned about code duplication - we've 2 entirely
separate impls of every disk format - one in blktap and one in QEMU
itself. The original motivation for the duplication was that QEMU's
block driver API did not support Async-IO operations, but that was
addressed in 0.9.0 - if you look at the internal QEMU block driver
API for disk formats vs blktaps internal driver API they're near
identical. I think it'd be an interesting project to actually make
QEMU userspace talk directly to blktap kernel driver, thus eliminating
the entire blktap users & all code duplication. Then we'd have parity
of disk support across PV & HVM guests too. Certainly not an easy or
quick project, but if someone's looking for something interesting to
hack on....

Dan.
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