Re: [libvirt] qemu and <transient/> disks
On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 07:29:00PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
Partly following up this message:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvirt-users/2011-October/msg00142.html
> > And what about qemu's option "snapshot=on" ?
>
> Unreliable. It won't work with SELinux (since qemu tries to create the
> snapshot on /tmp), and it makes your guest unmigratable. I think that
> it is easier to have libvirt use qemu-img to create a qcow2 wrapper
> prior to booting the guest, at which point the solution is easier to
> control from an sVirt perspective, and is more likely to allow us to
> figure out a way to make things work with migration (at least, I'm
> hoping I can figure out how to migrate a guest with a transient disk).
Lack of this feature is pretty annoying, particularly since
(a) libguestfs needs it and (b) it's a trivial patch to add
snapshot=on to the qemu driver. So to concentrate on the two
objections above:
- Why is SELinux concerned about qemu creating and using a file in
/tmp? Obviously it should stop qemu opening and reading random
files from /tmp but that would be a different rule surely?
Default labelling of files that are created is done based on the
directory label. Since /tmp is a shared directory, this is suboptimal.
We want snapshot files to go in a directory which is private to
QEMU.
More critically in Fedora 18, /tmp is tmpfs so you don't want
to be using that for arbitrarily large guest disk files.
I agree with the quoted text that libvirt should define a
directory to use for the transient disks under /var/lib/libvirt/images
perhaps, and just use 'qemu-img create' to create that, and the
unlink it once QEMU has started up, so we can auto-cleanup
on QEMU shutdown.
- The documentation actually states that using <transient/>
may make
your guest unable to migrate, and in any case we don't care.
I don't see what's wrong with the docs warning you about this.
> But if you want to use qemu's snapshot=on in the meantime,
you can
> use the <qemu:commandline> namespace XML to add it.
Is there an example how to do this? It seems like it might be
possible using a global qemu '-set device.<id>.snapshot=on' parameter,
but how can I know what <id> libvirt will give to a '-drive'
parameter? (I found from experimentation that it's something like
"drive-virtio-disk0", but I can't track down the bit of code that
produces this string yet ...)
Yes, you can use the -set option as you describe. The ID values
are produced by produced by qemuAssignDeviceAliases in qemu_command.c
Regards,
Daniel
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