Re: Providing official virtualisation images of Debian

[Moritz Mühlenhoff <jmm@inutil.org>]

Michael Tokarev <mjt@tls.msk.ru> schrieb:

>>> What virtualisation solutions should be supported?
>>> - Virtual Box seems like a natural candidate since it's free and
>>>   included since Squeeze.
>>> - Vmware has a significant installed base and is relevant, although
>>>   proprietary
>>> - Microsoft Virtual PC is likely also needed
>>> - Qemu
>>> - Citrix XenServer?
>> 
>> You don't mention KVM explicitly (it's almost identical to Qemu,
>> but fast), or Xen. Anyway, qemu-img can convert a raw disk image
>> into many other formats. So you generate one raw image, and then
>> convert it to any other formats using qemu-img.
>
> There is, actually, practically no need to provide different
> images, just one should be sufficient.
>
> The question is: how well all the listed virtualization solutions
> can work with raw images?

Ok, we could probably simply prepare an image in raw format and
ask people to test with various virtualisation solutions.

> If they can do that, it's the best approach to take: create _one_
> single image (of each distribution or point release, whatever) as
> a raw image, and include all software (drivers and agents) to work
> as a guest for any of the mentioned solutions.

The support drivers for Xen and virtio are mainlined and present
in the Squeeze kernel. At least the Vmware network driver also is
(vmxnet3).

The hv driver for Microsoft Virtual PC is only present in staging
not enabled in the Debian kernel.

> The only problem is that raw images may be large(ish).  For that,
> create as small as possible file, to fit stuff almost exactly,
> and recommend resizing it.  Maybe... :)

Having the images compressed with ZIP and bzip2 should probably
be equivalent?

Cheers,
        Moritz