Bug 638188

Description of problem:

I usually use the following commands to clone a virtual machine:

  # lvcreate -L 16G -n NewGuest VG
  # dd if=/dev/VG/OldGuest of=/dev/VG/NewGuest bs=1M

The problem is that the 'dd' takes a long time to complete, and
the new VM is of course not usable until it does.  Creating a snapshot
is a possibility for some situations, but for many what I really
want is a true copy (in particular, the new guest may be heavily
written to and get a large delta from the original).

It strikes me that it should be possible to implement a lazy
copy at the dm level, one where the copy is immediately available
(reads from the copy refer to the original, writes to either the
original or the copy cause the block to be copied, and the rest
of the blocks are copied in the background).

I talked to agk about this and he suggested:
<@agk> it's a feature that visegrips is working on
<@agk> based on - create a mirror, then split it
<@agk> - or you want the copy to be usable immediately -
  in which case we need to add a temp snapshot layer to that
<@agk> we've got all the components needed to do that
<@agk> they just need joining together in the right way into
  a device stack & lvm command

The proximate need for this is to reimplement the 'virt-clone'
command and make it fast.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

$ rpm -q lvm2
lvm2-2.02.73-2.fc13.x86_64