Bug 537082 - qemu-kvm: support enabling individual partitions
Summary: qemu-kvm: support enabling individual partitions
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: openSUSE 11.2
Classification: openSUSE
Component: Xen (show other bugs)
Version: Milestone 6
Hardware: Other openSUSE 11.2
: P5 - None : Enhancement with 5 votes (vote)
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Bruce Rogers
QA Contact: E-mail List
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Reported: 2009-09-06 12:00 UTC by Elmar Stellnberger
Modified: 2010-02-26 13:41 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

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Description Elmar Stellnberger 2009-09-06 12:00:50 UTC 
User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.5; Linux) KHTML/3.5.10 (like Gecko) SUSE

  It happens quite often that a user wants to boot another OS-installation instantaneously. f.i. I have installed Suse and Debian and want to boot Debian from Suse or vice versa (more often: boot elder Suse installation to confer user settings).
  Unfortunately it is only possible to free a whole disk not individual partitions by qemu-kvm so that qemu-kvm can only be used with os-installations set up explicitly for the usage as vm. Xen on the other hand allows freeing individual partitions but does regrettably not pose an alternative for desktop users since it has no power save features (s2ram crashes at me, s2disk not supported at all). Vmbox is no alternative since a second OS installation will usually be of 64bit. Vmware on the other hand is no free virtualisation tech..
  Why not allow a qemu-kvm vm the access just of certain partitions of a hdd? It should not be too hard to do but would greatly enhance its functionality!

Reproducible: Always
Comment 1 Elmar Stellnberger 2009-09-06 12:02:30 UTC 
  Implementing this feature would additionally deem Bug 428284 as obsolete!
Comment 2 Elmar Stellnberger 2010-02-24 20:56:24 UTC 
I have already implemented this myself and will publish it soon at http://www.elstel.com/qemu/.