In <200906010823.43037.rschulz@sonic.net>, Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Monday June 1 2009, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
What is the name / terminology used for this? If you give me the right keyword I should be able to google out everything.
... When you define a virtual machine you have the option of having the virtualized disks be backed by files (considered the default) or by actual disks or disk partitions.
any "block device" -- these are devices that support read, write, and seek operations like "normal" files.
Do you know any block devices these days that aren't disks or flash drives?
The ones that come to mind for me are dm-devices, md-devices, luks devices, and the special case dm-devices, LVM logical volumes and EVMS "logical volumes" (I don't remember the correct EVMS terminology). At the end of the day, block writes are usually destine for spinning platters, flash chips, or RAM chips; that's true. However, there may be a number of useful layers between the media and virtual machine software and the VM doesn't care as long as it exposes a block device interface. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/ \_/