Bug 1202900

Summary:	[feature request]: kpartx based mount for better performance
Product:	[Community] Virtualization Tools	Reporter:	Patrick Schleizer <adrelanos>
Component:	libguestfs	Assignee:	Richard W.M. Jones <rjones>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	unspecified	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	unspecified	CC:	ptoscano, rbalakri
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2015-03-17 16:42:15 UTC	Type:	Bug
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Patrick Schleizer 2015-03-17 16:33:32 UTC

guestmount is much too slow for my use case, unfortunately (running it inside VMs). kpartx/mount is much faster.

To my knowledge, no project exists that ships scripts for kpartx based mount/unmount. It would be useful to have it abstracted in with some nice /usr/bin/mountraw /path/to/raw /path/to/mount/folder interface.

I am not too eager to create such a new project / repository etc.

Would you be interested to ship kpartx/mount based (u)mount tools together with libguestfs?

I am not an expert, but I might contribute those scripts if you are interested. As separate bash based scripts.

Would you be interestd to have them and maintain them?

Comment 1 Richard W.M. Jones 2015-03-17 16:42:15 UTC

A key feature of libguestfs is isolation of the host kernel from exploits:
http://libguestfs.org/guestfs.3.html#security

I don't see how providing scripts would do anything but encourage
people to expose their hosts.

Also I can't see how these scripts could be made to work, in the
presence of common guest features like LVM.

If the scripts used libguestfs for inspection, they wouldn't be any
faster either.

If you have performance problems, look at:
http://libguestfs.org/guestfs-performance.1.html