On 23/01/16 09:08 -0800, Clint Byrum wrote:
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.

Yeah, this could work as well. It'd be weird to have it been both but I guess
that's fine from a metadata perspective.

An image's container and disk format shouldn't be the same for the same image,
though. Unless I'm missing something.

Flavio

--
@flaper87
Flavio Percoco

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