Commit Graph

4 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Stefan Hajnoczi 550830f935 block: delete cow block driver
This patch removes support for the cow file format.

Normally we do not break backwards compatibility but in this case there
is no impact and it is the most logical option.  Extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence so I will show why removing the cow block
driver is the right thing to do.

The cow file format is the disk image format for Usermode Linux, a way
of running a Linux system in userspace.  The performance of UML was
never great and it was hacky, but it enjoyed some popularity before
hardware virtualization support became mainstream.

QEMU's block/cow.c is supposed to read this image file format.
Unfortunately the file format was underspecified:

1. Earlier Linux versions used the MAXPATHLEN constant for the backing
   filename field.  The value of MAXPATHLEN can change, so Linux
   switched to a 4096 literal but QEMU has a 1024 literal.

2. Padding was not used on the header struct (both in the Linux kernel
   and in QEMU) so the struct layout varied across architectures.  In
   particular, i386 and x86_64 were different due to int64_t alignment
   differences.  Linux now uses __attribute__((packed)), QEMU does not.

Therefore:

1. QEMU cow images do not conform to the Linux cow image file format.

2. cow images cannot be shared between different host architectures.

This means QEMU cow images are useless and QEMU has not had bug reports
from users actually hitting these issues.

Let's get rid of this thing, it serves no purpose and no one will be
affected.

Signed-off-by: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>
Message-id: 1410877464-20481-1-git-send-email-stefanha@redhat.com
Signed-off-by: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com>
2014-09-22 11:39:45 +01:00
Peter Lieven 1f7bf7d068 qemu-iotests: change _supported_proto to file for various tests
all these tests do anything of the following and thus fail with any
protocol other than file:
 - the tests use rm, cp or mv shell commands which only work on file
 - the tests use qcow2.py
 - the images construct new filenames (e.g. backing file names) and
   the logic is broken for anything else than file

Signed-off-by: Peter Lieven <pl@kamp.de>
Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>
2014-02-09 09:12:38 +01:00
Fam Zheng d2329f27c9 qemu-iotests: Add _unsupported_imgopts for vmdk subformats
Some cases are not applicable for vmdk subformats those don't support
certain features, e.g. backing file, and some others can't run on
mult-file image, e.g. monolithicFlat. This adds declaration in test
cases to skip them automatically, so that iotests on vmdk can go
more smoothly (without manually picking of cases for each subformat).

Signed-off-by: Fam Zheng <famz@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>
2014-01-22 12:07:16 +01:00
Max Reitz 321fd7d2b8 qemu-iotests: Test case for backing file deletion
Add a test case for trying to open an image file where it is impossible
to open its backing file (in this case, because it was deleted). When
doing this, qemu (or qemu-io in this case) should not crash but rather
print an appropriate error message.

Signed-off-by: Max Reitz <mreitz@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Fam Zheng <famz@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>
2013-10-30 12:16:43 +01:00