This article introduces QEMU storage concepts including disk images, emulated storage controllers, block jobs, the qemu-img utility, and qemu-storage-daemon. If you are new to QEMU or want an overview of storage functionality in QEMU then this article explains how things fit together.

This article provides an overview of virtio-fs, a novel way for sharing the host file system with guests and OSv, a specialized, lightweight operating system (unikernel) for the cloud, as well as how these two fit together.

The previous article in this series introduced QEMU storage concepts. Now we move on to look at the two most popular emulated storage controllers for virtualization: virtio-blk and virtio-scsi.

Sometimes, there is a VM disk image whose contents you want to manipulate without booting the VM. One way of doing this is to use libguestfs, which can boot a minimal Linux VM to provide the host with secure access to the disk’s contents. For example, guestmount allows you to mount a guest filesystem on the host, without requiring root rights.

This summer I worked on adding Zoned Block Device (ZBD) support to virtio-blk as part of the Outreachy internship program. QEMU hasn’t directly supported ZBDs before so this article explains how they work and why QEMU needed to be extended.