[Pkg-libvirt-maintainers] Bug#594966: virt-manager: Silently labels existing disk images as 'raw'

[Guido Günther]

HI John,
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 12:30:06PM +0930, John Pearson wrote:
> Package: virt-manager
> Version: 0.8.4-7
> Severity: normal
> 
> 
> Virt manager allows you to attach an existing disk image to a virtual
> machine, but does not allow the user to specify the file format; it
> creates XML files that specify "driver='raw'" regardless of the image
> format.
> 
> Previous versions omitted the 'driver' attribute, and libvirt appeared
> to determine the format at run time; however the current Squeeze version
> of libvirt-bin (0.8.3-1) appears to assume 'raw' files if no 'driver'
> attribute is present.
> 
> Virt-manager should allow us to use existing non-raw (e.g., qcow2) images,
> by (e.g.) providing a listbox of supported file formats when adding an
> existing disk image to a VM, and populating the 'driver' attribute
> accordingly.
Since autoprobing of disk image types got disabled for security reasons
the listbox is the way to go. You can reenable image probing via
/etc/libvirt/qemu.conf but it's not recommended (see the comment at the
bottom of the file).
Cheers,
 -- Guido