On Sun, Jun 24, 2018 at 23:29:13 +0000, procmem wrote:
Hello. I'm interested in running guests as read-only to turn them into a sort of virtualized "live=cd". The goal is to leave no forensic evidence on the host disk or virtual one which would lead to traces on the host still- similar to how TAILS works but with the added convenince and flexibility of running in a VM. If I set the qcow image to read-only as per the manual, will any changes made during a session be written to disk (or a transient file on disk)?
Filesystems such as ext4 require write access to the device so they can play back the journal when mounting. This means that you have to allow writes. If you want to be sure that the writes don't touch any image, you need to create a overlay qcow2 image which will catch the writes and dispose it after the VM is turned off.