Support QEMU qcow2 image format #162
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This would be useful, but we already build & store 3 massive files for each eos build – it slows down the build process every night and occupies bytes on a disk somewhere in the sky forever.
I have a hunch that the VMDK images are essentially unused. I don't think we can determine from OS metrics/pings/activations whether a VM was installed from the VMDK or from an img/ISO. But maybe we can look at our CDN logs and see if anyone has ever downloaded them…
Fair point. I can try to dig some download logs today and see if they're ever downloaded. Personally I've never used Virtualbox, but almost certainly the OVF images are more useful on Windows or OSX. Alternatively, I could limit it to |
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I think limiting to base makes sense. |
I'll update the PR to do that and we can punt on OVF images. |
The QEMU qcow2 format[1][2] provides a lot of nice features compared to raw disk images. Some of the most important ones: * It's a copy-on-write format, so the file grows as data is added. * It supports compression. * It supports snapshots. The first 2 mean that a minimized download can be made with a lot of space to expand the root partition into. Probably most important to us, this is the format used by GNOME Boxes (really QEMU via libvirt). That means you can hand the image directly to boxes without creating a qcow2 disk image that the ISO installs to or converting a raw image to qcow2. 1. https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/images.html#cmdoption-image-formats-arg-qcow2 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qcow https://phabricator.endlessm.com/T35332
In my ideal world, we'd do this for all eos products and add them to osinfo-db. That way we could streamline the GNOME Boxes experience where it's just going to write all the data from the ISO to a qcow2 image anyways. However, doing this for the bigger personalities would add a lot of overhead. We'd really want to choose one of OVF or qcow2 as "the VM image" since doing both would be painful. For now, punt on that question and just enable it for the small base image where it can essentially be a power user tool. https://phabricator.endlessm.com/T35332
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PR updated with moar comments + limiting to EOS base. |
It's a nice format for loading in GNOME Boxes or any VM tool that uses QEMU. In particular, it's the native format used by GNOME Boxes.
https://phabricator.endlessm.com/T35332