Re: [Libguestfs] [PATCH] v2v: Output saved overlays in a machine-readable fashion

On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 03:33:25PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: When working on a conversion where the disk is already copied from the source hypervisor to the destination storage (due to various reasons, e.g. having faster access to one of the storages or being able to use the disk_sync script to prefetch some of the data before the machine gets shut down) I need to utilize virt-v2v for two specific purposes: 1) to create the output metadata and 2) to make the changes in the guest disks (which are already copied) but not for the third thing that virt-v2v does as well, which is copying the disks from source to destination. For case #1 I initially used virt-v2v --no-copy, which creates the metadata, but discards the changes made to the disks in the overlays and for #2 I used --in-place which changes the data on the source (for which I crafted a specific XML to be used with -i libvirtxml), but does not output any metadata for the destination. There are couple of issues I am facing with this: a) I need to run the conversion twice b) --in-place does not know about the destination (and it does not do the same thing as if it knew) c) It should only be done using --no-copy first and --in-place second just to make sure the modifications are not done twice (although this is just to stay on the safe side). It still felt like a massive hack to me and while I still held on to the idea of keeping the overlays around without actually copying the data anywhere I found the --debug-overlays option. It fits my use case perfectly because what I am doing now (with this patch) is: i) run virt-v2v --no-copy with the proper destination ii) take the overlays and run qemu-img commit on them iii) remove the overlays This way all of my concerns are solved and the only one that arises is the fact that --debug-overlays is documented as "... only used for debugging and may be removed in a future version." One interesting thing is that I only found that information in the man page after I wrote this patch and started using it. The reason for it was that I started actually writing something very similar to this and I stumbled upon the code that already does that (with --debug-overlays). I also thought that if someone runs virt-v2v --machine-readable --debug-overlays that the machine readable output would be broken because the output is not json, but it looks like (I'm just trying it now) --machine-readable does not write any data to stdout or stderr, even when specified as --machine-readable=stream:stdout (or stderr) for simple libvirt2libvirt migration. So point (b) from the commit message is probably invalid. Oh, actually, I don't see it being used for anything else than printing apabilities and estimates. I wonder where the json messages in machine readable logfile that virt-v2v-wrapper requests are coming from. One last thing is that currently any application that wants to run virt-v2v (virt-v2v-wrapper in my case) needs to parse the output to get any meaningful data from it. What I tried here was using a new type of message called 'data' that upper applications could just parse and use. In the long run I could add more data to the output so that it is easier to use from virt-v2v-wrapper and other applications. But that is not something that is necessary for this particular patch (or the discussion about the --debug-overlays being supported in the long term), it just made it easier. Does that make sense? For some more context/info, see How I used it in a PoC here: https://github.com/nertpinx/v2v-conversion-host/blob/asdf/wrapper/log_par...