action #90347
openSupport for downloading snapshots
0%
Description
According to rpalethorpe (the author of the big QEMU rewrite, merged as #985) including snapshots inside the qcow2 image is only semi supported (libvirt does not use this feature so it is barely supported). Thus everybody uses overlay files instead. That's why he rolled our own snapshotting solution using backing files/overlays (otherwise doing basic things like reverting to a snapshot uses wierd code nobody supports).
The implementation saves overlay files in vm-snapshots directory (in pool directory) and qemu_state.json describes the snapshots. We need to allow user to download these files. I suggest to introduce new variable SAVE_SNAPSHOTS which would be by default off.
- document how to use these overlay files
Some more reading about overlays (external snapshots) and internal snapshots (
qemu-img): - https://www.linux-kvm.org/images/6/65/02x08B-Max_Reitz-Backups_with_QEMU.pdf
- https://kashyapc.fedorapeople.org/virt/LinuxCon-NA-2016/A-Practical-Look-at-QEMU-Block-Layer-Primitives-LC-NA-2016.pdf
- https://libvirt.org/kbase/incrementalbackupinternals.html
Updated by rpalethorpe about 3 years ago
I'm not sure if we already had a ticket for this. But anyway, yes we could tar up the qemu_state.json, qcow2 images and ram images. This may be a lot more work than it seems though. The QEMU state doesn't include all the OpenQA state.
Updated by okurz about 3 years ago
- Priority changed from Normal to Low
- Target version set to future
thanks for the ticket. Hopefully the "just tar it up" could be easily done eventually :)