Re: Providing temporary storage space to a VM: qcow, nfs etc

[Mayuresh <mayuresh%acm.org@localhost>]

On Thu, Jun 25, 2020 at 10:00:46AM +0100, Ottavio Caruso wrote:
> You need to put a bit of context here. What do you want to achieve?
> What parts of the filesystem(s) do you want to share between host and
> guest?

At present I am not thinking about sharing, though I could set it up such
that /usr/pkgsrc and distfiles are shared, though I'll have to ensure that
when I switch the pkgsrc activity between systems I always do pkgclean.

But that's not the primary concern. Concern is to allow for spikes in
space usage which some builds require. And want to achieve it without
pre-reserving too much space and reclaiming space for the host.

Yes, your solution to shrink qcow2 would work. But looking for
alternatives as well - such as NFS (or equivalent) which will not involve
those hassles and will be more flexible in terms of managing space. Not
expecting it to match the virtual disk performance, but it should not be
much slower also.

In short which network based file system (I guess it's only NFS), with
some tuning, can give me a good performance, and what sort of tuning
tricks are involved. Here the network is local between host and guest. If
that can't improve beyond a point I'll go for qcow2 shrinking.

Mayuresh