Expand description
This crate can parse and read qcow2 virtual disks, as used by qemu and other emulators.
Qcow2 is a flexible format for disk images, that only allocates space as needed. It has many other interesting features.
The following featuers are supported by this crate:
- Reading blocks of virtual disk data.
- Reading data that is not aligned to block boundaries.
- Parsing and validation of the header.
- Reporting the names of any unsupported features, using the “feature name table” extension.
- Basic caching of guest data locations, so nearby reads will be fast.
These features are not yet supported, but should be easy to add:
- Listing and reading snapshots.
- Reading version 2, currently only version 3 is supported.
- Reading compressed data.
- Backing file support, so you can chain qcow2 files together.
- Reporting information about images.
These features are harder, or less interesting to me. Patches welcome!
- Reading encrypted qcow2 files.
- Writing virtual disk data.
- Repairing the disk if refcounts are out of date.
- Compacting the virtual disk so it takes less space.
- Maintaining a “dirty bitmap” to make backups faster.
- Creating new qcow2 images.
- Creating new snapshots.
- Checking qcow2 images for inconsistencies.
- Merging images into their backing file.
- Resizing images.
The repository for this crate is at https://github.com/vasi/qcow2-rs
Structs§
Enums§
- Error
- The error type for Qcow2 operations.
Type Aliases§
- Result
- The result type for operations on qcow2 images.