Proposed Feature: qcow2 disk image support

[whoni...@mail2tor.com]

Hello,

Question: Does Qubes currently support qcow2 disk images? (my personal
test failed)

Proposal: We would like to propose qcow2 disk image support in Qubes.

Background:

We at the Whonix project are currently working on porting Whonix over to
Qubes. We are also looking at providing more official built-in support for
Qubes in the main Whonix downloads.

Whonix currently provides .ova packages with .vmdk images for VirtualBox
and .qcow2 images for use with other visualization systems such as QEMU,
KVM, etc.

That's already 2 formats, for 2 VMs (gateway & workstation)...

- Whonix-Gateway.ova
- Whonix-Workstation.ova
- Whonix-Gateway.qcow2
- Whonix-Workstation.qcow2

Whonix maintainers would very much not have to support yet another disk
format (raw .img).

However, the Whonix project very much is interested in providing support
for Qubes OS throughout the future.

The qcow2 image format is also known to be more feature rich as well.

Thank you.



P.S. Those interested in the current Qubes + Whonix development effort can
find the thread here (feel free to join in):
https://www.whonix.org/forum/index.php/topic,392.0.html

[Joanna Rutkowska]

On 08/17/14 15:03, whoni...@mail2tor.com wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Question: Does Qubes currently support qcow2 disk images? (my personal
> test failed)
>
> Proposal: We would like to propose qcow2 disk image support in Qubes.
>
> Background:
>
> We at the Whonix project are currently working on porting Whonix over to
> Qubes. We are also looking at providing more official built-in support for
> Qubes in the main Whonix downloads.
>

Very cool!

> Whonix currently provides .ova packages with .vmdk images for VirtualBox
> and .qcow2 images for use with other visualization systems such as QEMU,
> KVM, etc.
>
> That's already 2 formats, for 2 VMs (gateway & workstation)...
>
> - Whonix-Gateway.ova
> - Whonix-Workstation.ova
> - Whonix-Gateway.qcow2
> - Whonix-Workstation.qcow2
>
> Whonix maintainers would very much not have to support yet another disk
> format (raw .img).
>
> However, the Whonix project very much is interested in providing support
> for Qubes OS throughout the future.
>
> The qcow2 image format is also known to be more feature rich as well.
>
> Thank you.
>
>
>
> P.S. Those interested in the current Qubes + Whonix development effort can
> find the thread here (feel free to join in):
> https://www.whonix.org/forum/index.php/topic,392.0.html
>

Exactly because qcow is much more "feature rich" than plain-stupid-raw,
we don't want to include it into Qubes TCB. Currently the VM images are
kept in Dom0 by default and this is were the block backends are located.

However, we already have some support for starting VMs using backends
hosted in other VMs: you can pass the VM name to --cdrom/--hddisk
options for qvm-start (also nicely supported from Qubes Manager).
E.g. I have a VM called "installs" where I keep all the various
installation ISOs I copied from my DVDs or downloaded from the net. When
I need to create a new HVM, I just point to the ISO on the "installs" VM
filesystem and so I never need to copy it to Dom0. I'm not sure how much
tinkering would it require to use this to serve qcow2 image.

In the future (Qubes R3) we plan on expanding on this mechanism and e.g.
use it together with remote management infrastructure for provisioning
of VMs. But for R2, I think it would be easiest to just "compile"
everything into .raw -- is that really so much overhead?

joanna.

[whoni...@mail2tor.com]

> Exactly because qcow is much more "feature rich" than plain-stupid-raw,
> we don't want to include it into Qubes TCB. Currently the VM images are
> kept in Dom0 by default and this is were the block backends are located.

Ah, yes. That makes sense.

> However, we already have some support for starting VMs using backends
> hosted in other VMs: you can pass the VM name to --cdrom/--hddisk
> options for qvm-start (also nicely supported from Qubes Manager).
> E.g. I have a VM called "installs" where I keep all the various
> installation ISOs I copied from my DVDs or downloaded from the net. When
> I need to create a new HVM, I just point to the ISO on the "installs" VM
> filesystem and so I never need to copy it to Dom0. I'm not sure how much
> tinkering would it require to use this to serve qcow2 image.

Handy to know this. Thanks!

> In the future (Qubes R3) we plan on expanding on this mechanism and e.g.
> use it together with remote management infrastructure for provisioning
> of VMs. But for R2, I think it would be easiest to just "compile"
> everything into .raw -- is that really so much overhead?

We're still testing various approaches for Qubes + Whonix.

But this could become an option.


Thanks for your feedback, Joanna!

[Manuel Amador (Rudd-O)]

On 08/17/2014 08:44 AM, whoni...@mail2tor.com wrote:
>> Exactly because qcow is much more "feature rich" than plain-stupid-raw,
>> we don't want to include it into Qubes TCB. Currently the VM images are
>> kept in Dom0 by default and this is were the block backends are located.
> Ah, yes. That makes sense.
>

Note that there is work being done by someone on this list to add
multiple storage backend support, so that you can e.g. use the advanced
features (snapshotting, COW, reflink) of the storage subsystem of your
choice, whether it be LVM, or btrfs, or ZFS. Search the lists for the
terms and you'll be able to spot the people working on that, and perhaps
help them.

--
Rudd-O
http://rudd-o.com/

[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki]

On 17.08.2014 15:03, whoni...@mail2tor.com wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Question: Does Qubes currently support qcow2 disk images? (my personal
> test failed)
>
> Proposal: We would like to propose qcow2 disk image support in Qubes.
>
> Background:
>
> We at the Whonix project are currently working on porting Whonix over to
> Qubes. We are also looking at providing more official built-in support for
> Qubes in the main Whonix downloads.
>
> Whonix currently provides .ova packages with .vmdk images for VirtualBox
> and .qcow2 images for use with other visualization systems such as QEMU,
> KVM, etc.
>
> That's already 2 formats, for 2 VMs (gateway & workstation)...
>
> - Whonix-Gateway.ova
> - Whonix-Workstation.ova
> - Whonix-Gateway.qcow2
> - Whonix-Workstation.qcow2
>
> Whonix maintainers would very much not have to support yet another disk
> format (raw .img).

You can simply convert qcow2 to raw as part of Whonix installation on Qubes.
AFAIR someone on the list had done it even from ova/ovf.

> However, the Whonix project very much is interested in providing support
> for Qubes OS throughout the future.
>
> The qcow2 image format is also known to be more feature rich as well.
>
> Thank you.
>
>
>
> P.S. Those interested in the current Qubes + Whonix development effort can
> find the thread here (feel free to join in):
> https://www.whonix.org/forum/index.php/topic,392.0.html
>

--
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?