A couple of days ago kvm-87 was released featuring bug fixes, performance improvements, a preview of irqfd, new support for http protocol using curl version 6., and additional support for port redirection. The most notable of these from the end user perspective is the new http support. A good use case for this new feature is booting a livecd over http with a command like “qemu-kvm -cdrom http://www.sample.com/linux.iso”. Awesome!
I would hope that this stuff gets stored in a fashion like torrents work, where you download bits and pieces at a time as needed. I would hope that multiple reads from the same spot of the ISO wouldn’t go over HTTP again.
I’m interested to see how well this works.
Although it sounds incredibly inefficient as I assume the disk image will not remain on your hard disk for future use, that is kinda cool 🙂
Incredibly trivial to implement (if a URL is passed, tell Curl to download the URL and then use it like a regular file), but cool nonetheless. I’m sure someone will find a good use for it.