Re: [Libguestfs] xfs protofiles for libguestfs
On Tue, Apr 12, 2022 at 09:06:42PM -0700, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
Possibly the answer here is that protofiles have have their day, and
mkfs.xfs should just grow the means to import a directory tree into the
filesystem so that you can run the image creation tools as non-root.
It would definitely be more useful. We use the mke2fs -d option
in quite a lot of places.
However it's my understanding (maybe wrong?) that the reason that
option exists in e2fsprogs is because that already has a nice
userspace library for creating and parsing ext4 filesystems (-lext2fs)
and that no such library exists for XFS. So that would need to be
implemented first which is a significant amount of work.
If it would be more generally useful for libguestfs to be able to
format
and populate filesystems, we could talk about committing xfs_protofile
into the upstream xfsprogs distribution, as well as enhancing it to pick
up extended attributes and fsxattrs from the files it's importing?
libguestfs can already format & populate filesystems, and because that
is generic it can do it for any filesystem including XFS, and for both
new and existing filesystems:
https://libguestfs.org/virt-make-fs.1.html
https://libguestfs.org/virt-format.1.html
https://libguestfs.org/virt-tar-in.1.html
Rich.
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