Richard Jones

Loop mounts let you mount a simple file as a device. But imagine having "FUSE for loop mounts". Linux Network Block Device (NBD) with the nbdkit server takes the concept of loop mounting to the next level, giving you a flexible, scriptable loop device, useful for end users, and for developers wanting to test anything involving a block device.

Loop mounts let you mount a simple file as a device. Network Block Device (NBD) with the nbdkit server takes this concept to the next level. You can mount compressed files. Turn multiple files into a partitioned device. Mount esoteric formats like VMDK. NBD can also be used for testing: You can create giant devices up to 2^63 bytes in RAM and find out how filesystems cope. Inject errors on demand into your block devices to test error detection and recovery. Add delays to make disks deliberately slow. I will also show you how to write useful block devices using 10 line shell scripts, and show some advanced live visualizations of how the kernel and filesystems use block devices.

Libguestfs (http://libguestfs.org) is a library and set of tools for securely and automatically performing many operations on disk images, from creating them to finding out what is in them.

In this 15 minute lightning talk, Richard Jones will talk about a few of the latest features, including the ability to churn out a new guest every 60 seconds using virt-builder, how to really compress disk images using virt-sparsify and xz. and "sysprepping" using virt-sysprep.

Libguestfs (http://libguestfs.org) is a library and set of tools for securely and automatically performing many operations on disk images, from creating them to finding out what is in them.

It is a C library with bindings in many different programming languages. It also comes with many "virt-*" tools for performing common operations, such as building operating systems from scratch (virt-builder), resizing operating systems (virt-resize), sparsifying disk images (virt-sparsify), editing files (virt-edit) and more.

In this 15 minute lightning talk, Richard Jones will talk about a few of the latest features from the recently announced version 1.24. This will include a demonstration of how virt-builder can build a new OS image in well under 60 seconds. How you can really compress huge disk images down to relatively small files using virt-sparsify and xz. And how you can use virt-sysprep to "sysprep" cloned virtual machines.

libguestfs is a set of tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine (VM) disk images. You can use this to inject files, resize, rescue, create, view or audit disks. libguestfs is also a library that you can link to management programs written in C, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java and other languages. In this talk, Richard Jones will introduce the tools and give live demonstrations. He also talks about how they work behind the scenes.