The use-case for this is to pass-through a USB storage device to the VM. More specifically, this will permit me to run a small (10-20GB) VM on a laptop and deploy as many different OSes as I can download onto a USB disk without needing to dedicate space on the laptop's disk for this purpose. In other words, portable UltimateDeploymentAppliance, emphasizing the appliance part.
While I was looking through the source for this, I noticed there are two somewhat related items, including a very promising "Local UDA" option and the "Local CDROM" choice in the Storage menu.
Both of these are a bit too restrictive to be useful for this purpose though (the first just mounts the locallv logical volume (LV) on a fixed path, the second permits you to specify an arbitrary device / file, but specifies the filetype and loop mounting).
I suggest as a first pass (1) permitting mounting of arbitrary paths, and as a second pass / stretch goal (2), presenting a list of devices for the user to select from (possibly permitting arbitrary paths also?) for local UDA, and a path / file selector similar to the one in the OS creation wizard for the CDROM mount. The purpose of the stretch goal is to:
Improve the UX
Avoid requiring users to log into the console to identify the device name assigned to a given device.
Reduce the chance of typos for users.
I have implemented the first pass (1) and am happy to offer a pull request if it seems desirable. It is a pretty small change, and highly functional in my experience so far.
I'm interested in comment / discussion regarding (1) and (2).
The use-case for this is to pass-through a USB storage device to the VM. More specifically, this will permit me to run a small (10-20GB) VM on a laptop and deploy as many different OSes as I can download onto a USB disk without needing to dedicate space on the laptop's disk for this purpose. In other words, portable UltimateDeploymentAppliance, emphasizing the appliance part.
While I was looking through the source for this, I noticed there are two somewhat related items, including a very promising "Local UDA" option and the "Local CDROM" choice in the Storage menu.
Both of these are a bit too restrictive to be useful for this purpose though (the first just mounts the locallv logical volume (LV) on a fixed path, the second permits you to specify an arbitrary device / file, but specifies the filetype and loop mounting).
I suggest as a first pass (1) permitting mounting of arbitrary paths, and as a second pass / stretch goal (2), presenting a list of devices for the user to select from (possibly permitting arbitrary paths also?) for local UDA, and a path / file selector similar to the one in the OS creation wizard for the CDROM mount. The purpose of the stretch goal is to:
I have implemented the first pass (1) and am happy to offer a pull request if it seems desirable. It is a pretty small change, and highly functional in my experience so far.
I'm interested in comment / discussion regarding (1) and (2).