Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] qemu-img: add FUSE-based image access

[Jan Kiszka]

Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 06:52:59PM +0100, Jan Kiszka wrote:
>> This adds the "map" subcommand to qemu-img. It is able to expose the raw
>> content of a disk image via a FUSE filesystem. Both the whole disk can
>> be accessed, e.g. to run partitioning tools against it, as well as
>> individual partitions. This allows to create new filesystems in the
>> image or loop-back mount exiting ones. Using the great mountlo tool
>> from the FUSE collection [1][2], the latter can even be done by non-root
>> users (the former anyway).
> 
> Is there a good reason to throw this into qemu-img instead of making
> a separate qemu-fuse or similar tool?  It's doing something quite
> different than the rest of qemu-img.
> 

qemu-img is the swiss knife for QEMU disk image manipulation (like git
is for everything around a git repository). So, IHMO, mapping the image
content into the host filesystem for further manipulation with standard
tools belongs to this.

If the "map" thing works out for most users, I could even imagine some
helper sub-command "mount" that encapsulates map and mountlo (or some
other unprivileged mounting mechanism). This should make it easier for
users to explore all possibilities they have when working with disk images.

Jan

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