[Fedora-xen] Kickstart slowness with virt-install

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2007 at 11:50:16PM +0100, Paul Wouters wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Mar 2007, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> 
> > Yes, upfront time will be longer due to the need to pre-allocate the
> > disk, this should be more than offset by the faster install time. So
> > I'd use --nonsparse as a general rule.
> 
> So why isn't that the default for virt-install? The other risk is the
> admin creating a truckload of sparse images, and the guests ending
> with really odd problems months later when it turns out there isn't
> enough diskspace, and no one can figure out this has happened after
> running so well before...

If we were writing virt-install again today, we would make it the
default, but we've had two Fedora release where virt-install defaulted
to sparse files. Changing existing behaviour of a command isn't all that
nice, even if there are potential benefits to be had. So we added the
--nonsparse flag and left the existing behaviour unchanged.

Regards,
Dan.
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