[Fedora-xen] Guest Image File Size

[John Summerfield]

Aaron Metzger wrote:
> virt-install has a checkbox which suggests that you can avoid 
> preallocating the entire guest image size -- that the guest image file 
> will grow on demand.
> 
> Does this work for Xen or is it only supported for KVM and the QEMU COW 
> files?

It's a filesystem property:
[root at potoroo ~]# ls -shoog /var/lib/xen/images/*
1.1G -rwxr-xr-x 1 3.1G Nov  7 10:39 /var/lib/xen/images/ClarkConnect.img
2.9G -rwxr-xr-x 1 3.1G Nov 30 18:31 /var/lib/xen/images/DebianEtch.img
4.0G -rwxr-xr-x 1 4.0G Nov 28 17:49 /var/lib/xen/images/F8-1.img
  16K -rwxr-xr-x 1 4.0G Nov 28 17:57 /var/lib/xen/images/F8-2.img
  16K -rwxr-xr-x 1 4.0G Nov 28 17:38 /var/lib/xen/images/F8.img
  16K -rwxr-xr-x 1 4.1G Nov  7 14:06 /var/lib/xen/images/Fedora7.img
  16K -rwxr-xr-x 1 2.1G Nov 12 22:55 /var/lib/xen/images/FreeBSD_70.img
129M -rwxr-xr-x 1 4.0G Nov 18 15:51 /var/lib/xen/images/Gentoo.2.img
2.9G -rwxr-xr-x 1 3.1G Nov 18 17:00 /var/lib/xen/images/Gentoo.img
  16K -rwxr-xr-x 1 3.1G Nov  5 08:45 /var/lib/xen/images/Kubuntu.img
  16K -rwxr-xr-x 1 2.1G Nov  4 10:00 /var/lib/xen/images/NetBSD-31.img
  16K -rwxr-xr-x 1 4.0G Nov 28 17:55 /var/lib/xen/images/f8.img
1.1G -rwxr-xr-x 1 2.1G Nov  7 07:52 /var/lib/xen/images/windows_c.img
[root at potoroo ~]#


> 
> My experience when creating Xen guests as regular files is that I end up 
> with a file that is the full size even when I pick the option to not 
> preallocate the entire image.

To interpret my listing above,
man ls

-- 

Cheers
John

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