On Thu, 2007-08-09 at 15:32 -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
Avi Kivity wrote:
Anthony Liguori wrote:
If you're looking for a low-end solution, another possibility would
be having a "new" file format which consisted of:
#!/path/to/qemu [<args> ...] <nl>
<standard disk image>
And then make the appropriate changes to QEMU such that it can skip
the first line in a disk image file. This has a few nice side
effects. The disk image is directly executable and it makes it very
clear to the user that they have to trust the disk image. The other
nice thing is that it would work with file formats other than qcow2.
Well, it would be nice to align the disk image to a sector boundary
(or, better, a page boundary). But yes, a very good idea.
That has the very nice side effect of allowing you to edit the command
line with a text editor provided you don't cross the sector boundary.
Filling with spaces would be pretty nice.
Its a bad idea. Either have a line terminated file, or a pure binary
file, but don't mix them. Besides firing up an editor to modify it
being a royal pain, mystery breakages will occur when someone has their
editor set to "insert mode" (which is the default) vs "overwrite mode"
and doesn't notice those extra spaces moving beyond the 512-byte mark.
Brian