Re: [PATCH] KVM: Add wrapper script around QEMU to test kernels

From: Alexander Graf
Date: Tue Nov 08 2011 - 12:23:02 EST


On 11/08/2011 03:59 PM, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
On Tue, Nov 08, 2011 at 04:57:04PM +0200, Avi Kivity wrote:
Running qemu -snapshot on the actual root block device is the only
safe way to reuse the host installation, although it gets a bit
complicated if people have multiple devices mounted into the namespace.
How is -snapshot any different? If the host writes a block after the
guest has been launched, but before that block was cowed, then the guest
will see the new block.
Right, thinko - qemu's snapshots are fairly useless due to sitting
ontop of the file to be modified.

It could work with a btrfs snapshot, but not everyone uses that.
Or LVM snapshot. Either way, just reusing the root fs without care
is a dumb idea, and I really don't want any tool or script that
encurages such braindead behaviour in the kernel tree.

Heh, yeah, the intent was obviously to have a separate rootfs tree somewhere in a directory. But that's not available at first when running this, so I figured for a simple "get me rolling" FAQ directing the guest's rootfs to / at least gets you somewhere (especially when run as user with init=/bin/bash).

Alex

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