>    * 10 GB Storage volume on Storage pool on USB drive folder

In order to reproduce it, may I know how do you create this storage pool and volume (thru cockpit or some virsh commands)?

I don't think there is anything wrong with virt-install.  The described use-case seems wrong to me.

Yehuda, what led you to use directory as a volume for QEMU based VM? The message is clear, it is not supported.

Can you please point me to documentation that led you to this use-case and what part of documentation is blocked?


The suggestion from Simon doesn't work.  If I change the type="dir" into type="fat" I'll get a different error message:

  error: unsupported configuration: virtual FAT storage can't be accessed in read-write mode

so that is not a solution as well.

I've checked the documentation and there is nothing about selecting existing storage volume.  The use-case described in this BZ tries to use directory as a storage volume which is not supported by QEMU and hence the error message.  There is also no issue with virt-install is it correctly creates an XML where the disk has type="dir" which is true.

I'm moving it back to cockpit where they can figure out if they want to fix it or just create a documentation.

These are the possible solutions:

  1) Do not display volumes type="dir" as it will not work for disks.

  2) When selecting existing volume during VM installation display volume format (dir, iso, raw, qcow2, ...) as virt-manager is doing it for storage volumes as well.

  3) Document that volume type="dir" is not supported.

  4) Ignore this completely as the error message is descriptive and close this as NOTABUG.

  5) Something else.

I don't have usb drive to reproduce it, but seems like the root cause is not nested or usb drive related. I reproduced the issue with following steps, please help to correct me if it's not the right one, thanks.

Reproduced with following package on RHEL8.2:
cockpit-machines-211.2-1.el8.noarch

Steps:
1. Prepare a RHEL8.2 env
2. Create default pool:
# virsh pool-create-as --name default --type dir --target /var/lib/libvirt/images
3. Create a xml use the one in comment 8:
# cat vol-images.xml
<volume type='dir'>
  <name>images</name>
  <key>/var/lib/libvirt/images/images</key>
  <source>
  </source>
  <capacity unit='bytes'>0</capacity>
  <allocation unit='bytes'>0</allocation>
  <target>
    <path>/var/lib/libvirt/images/images</path>
    <format type='dir'/>
    <permissions>
      <mode>0775</mode>
      <owner>1000</owner>
      <group>1000</group>
      <label>unconfined_u:object_r:user_home_t:s0</label>
    </permissions>
    <timestamps>
      <atime>1568890772.138164956</atime>
      <mtime>1567600815.041409020</mtime>
      <ctime>1567600815.041409020</ctime>
    </timestamps>
  </target>
</volume>
4. Create volume:
# virsh vol-create --pool  default vol-images.xml
5. On cockpit web console, click "Create VM",configure as following:
Name:fedora30
Installation Type:Download an OS
Operating System:Fedora 30
Storage:default
Volume:images
Keep others as default,click "Create"

The creation of VM failed with message:
Creation of VM fedora failed 
ERROR unsupported configuration: 'directory' storage format is not directly supported by QEMU, use 'dir' disk type instead Domain installation does not appear to have been successful. If it was, you can restart your domain by running: virsh --connect qemu:///system start fedora otherwise, please restart your installation.

This looks correct and it is not related to USB or nested VM.

After evaluating this issue, there are no plans to address it further or fix it in an upcoming release.  Therefore, it is being closed.  If plans change such that this issue will be fixed in an upcoming release, then the bug can be reopened.