On Tue, Oct 16, 2007 at 03:42:50PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
The attached patch (for discussion only) adds a virDomainBlockPeek call, allowing callers to peek into the block devices of domains.
+/** + * virDomainBlockPeek: + * @dom: pointer to the domain object + * @path: path to the block device + * @offset: offset within block device + * @size: size to read + * @buffer: return buffer (must be at least size bytes) + * + * This function allows you to read the contents of a domain's + * disk device. + * + * Typical uses for this are to determine if the domain has + * written a Master Boot Record (indicating that the domain + * has completed installation), or to try to work out the state + * of the domain's filesystems.
IMHO, if we had storage management APIs this use case could be better handled by simply having a piece of metadata associated with the volume. eg, you could just run virVolumeDumpXML() and look for an element <parttable type='mbr'/> Lack of such an element would indicate it was not partitioned. It could also return 'gpt' for the new fangled EFI bios partitioning scheme, or whatever format BSD/Solaris/Sun uses. This would avoid the ned for every application caller to repeat the magic for sniffing partition table types. Regards, Dan. -- |=- Red Hat, Engineering, Emerging Technologies, Boston. +1 978 392 2496 -=| |=- Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ -=| |=- Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/ -=| |=- GnuPG: 7D3B9505 F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 -=|