Excerpts from Brian Rosmaita's message of 2016-01-23 06:54:26 -0800: > Please provide feedback about a proposal to add 'tar' as a new Glance > disk_format.[0] > > The Ironic team is adding support for "OS tarball images" in Mitaka. This is > a compressed tar archive of a / (root filesystem). These tarballs are created > by first installing the OS packages in a chroot and then compressing the > chroot as tar.*. The proposal is to store such images as disk_format == tar > and container_format == bare. > > Intuitively, 'tar' seems more like a container_format. The Glance developer > documentation, however, says that "The container format refers to whether the > virtual machine image is in a file format that also contains metadata about > the actual virtual machine."[1] Under this proposal, there is no such > metadata included. > > The Glance docs say this about disk_format: "The disk format of a virtual > machine image is the format of the underlying disk image. Virtual appliance > vendors have different formats for laying out the information contained in a > virtual machine disk image."[1] Under this definition, 'tar' as used in this > proposal [0] does in fact seem to be a disk_format. > > There is not currently a 'tar' container format defined for Glance. The > closest we have now is 'ova' (an OVA tar archive file) and 'docker' (a Docker > tar archive of the container filesystem). And, in fact, 'tar' as a container > format wouldn't be very helpful, as it doesn't indicate where in the tarball > the metadata should be found. > > The goal here is to come up with an identifier for an "OS tarball image" > that's acceptable across projects and isn't confusing for people who are > creating images. >
Seems fine to just have tar be both the container and image format, even if it means the metadata portion just turns out to be null. Right? The key is to be able to feed it to hypervisors that can deal with it, and Ironic is presumably able to deal with it since they're asking for it. __________________________________________________________________________ OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) Unsubscribe: openstack-dev-requ...@lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
