[et-mgmt-tools] Virtinst and blktap

[Cole Robinson]

Mark Johnson wrote:
> On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 6:12 PM, Michael DeHaan <mdehaan at redhat.com> wrote:
>> I had a user question about how they can specify blktap for Xen in Cobbler
>> instead of the file driver (for performance reasons) ... well, it turns out
>> they can't (yet).
>>
>> Under what conditions can we use blktap, and is that advisable?   (I had
>> thought this might work like virtio, in which case, passing in the os
>> version uses a table, but it seems this may only actually depend on the host
>> and has no guest limitations?)
>>
>> It looks like from the virtinst code I could just call
>> utils.is_blktap_capable() from my libvirt-using application and if so, then
>> pass the driver=DRIVER_TAP options to virstinst.
>>
>> Good idea?  Bad idea?
> 
> For Solaris dom0, I have a patch that allows driver and subdriver in
> virt-install.
> If interested, I'm happy to submit it..Note, our blktap is different
> (vdisk). We
> have an additional format selection too.
> 
>   virt-install -p -n nevada -l /export/snv108.iso --nographics \
>      --noautoconsole -r 1024 \
>      --disk path=/export/nevada/disk0,size=10,driver=tap,subdriver=vdisk,format=vdi
> 
> 
> MRJ

Sounds like a reasonable addition to me. I'd be interested in a patch.
Driver/subdriver and format should probably be two different patches though.

Thanks,
Cole