Features/DriveRefactoring

Summary

Refactor -drive option to better reflect separation of backend and frontend.

Owner

• Name: Anthony Liguori
• Email: anthony@codemonkey.ws

Detailed Summary

To create a separate drive backend, today we need to specify:

-drive file=/path/to/image,if=none,id=foo
-device virtio-blk-pci,drive=foo

This is awkward to use at best and is not symmetric to other options in qemu. This feature proposes a new syntax:

-blkdev file=/path/to/image,id=foo
-device virtio-vlk-pci,blkdev=foo

-blkdev only takes valid backend options. Like netdev and fsdev, the same name is used to connect the backend. -drive would continue to be supported as a syntactic short-cut.

Status

The feature has been completed (but it's called '-blockdev' now and not 'blkdev')