QEMU Copy On Write

qcow

Developed by	QEMU
Type of format	Disk image
Container for	File system

qcow stands for "QEMU Copy On Write" and denotes a disk storage optimization strategy that delays allocation of storage until it is actually needed. QEMU is an emulator and virtual machine container, and it can use a variety of virtual disk images which are generally associated with specific guests operating systems.

1 Features 2 Supported formats 3 qcow2 4 Application 5 External links

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http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/Images

QEMU/Images

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Once QEMU has been installed, it should be ready to run a guest OS from a disc image. This image is a file that represents the data on a hard disc. From the perspective of the guest OS, it actually is a hard disc, and it can create its own filesystem on the virtual disc.
You can download a few guest OS images from the QEMU website, including a simple 8MB image of a Linux distro. To run it, download and unzip the image in a folder and run the QEMU command.

qemu linux-0.2.img

Replace linux-0.2.img with the name of your guest OS image file. If it has a GUI and you want to use your mouse with it, double-click on the window and QEMU will grab your mouse. To make QEMU release your mouse again, hold down the Control and Alt keys simultaneously, then let go - your mouse will be released back to X.
Aurélien Jarno of Debian has prepared a number of pre-packaged Debian qemu images for several architectures, including ARM, Sparc, PowerPC, x86_64, and i386. They can be found at http://people.debian.org/~aurel32/qemu/

• 1 Image types
• 2 Creating an image
• 3 Using multiple images
• 4 Copy on write
• 5 Mounting an image on the host
• 6 Copying an image to a physical device
• 7 Getting information
• 8 Converting image formats
  • 8.1 Exchanging images with VirtualBox