Alberto Garcia's blog
Introduction Some months ago, my colleague Madeeha Javed and I wrote a tool to convert QEMU disk images into qcow2, writing the result directly to stdout. This tool is called qcow2-to-stdout.py and can be used for example to create a new image and pipe it through gzip and/or send it directly over the network without [ ]
Introduction If you use SteamOS and you like to install third-party tools or modify the system-wide configuration some of your changes might be lost after an OS update. Read on for details on why this happens and what to do about it. As you all know SteamOS uses an immutable root filesystem and users are [ ]
Introduction In my previous post I talked about how to use systemd-sysext to add software to the Steam Deck without modifying the root filesystem. In this post I will give a brief overview of two additional methods. Distrobox distrobox is a tool that uses containers to create a mutable environment on top of your OS. [ ]
Introduction: an immutable OS The Steam Deck runs SteamOS, a single-user operating system based on Arch Linux. Although derived from a standard package-based distro, the OS in the Steam Deck is immutable and system updates replace the contents of the root filesystem atomically instead of using the package manager. An immutable OS makes the system [ ]
Introduction The Steam Deck is a handheld gaming computer that runs a Linux-based operating system called SteamOS. The machine comes with SteamOS 3 (code name holo ), which is in turn based on Arch Linux. Although there is no SteamOS 3 installer for a generic PC (yet), it is very easy to install on a virtual [ ]
In previous blog posts I talked about QEMU s qcow2 file format and how to make it faster. This post gives an overview of how the data is structured inside the image and how that affects performance, and this presentation at KVM Forum 2017 goes further into the topic. This time I will talk about a [ ]
Like all other major browser engines, WebKit is a project that evolves very fast with releases every few weeks containing new features and security fixes. WebKitGTK is available in Debian under the webkit2gtk name, and we are doing our best to provide the most up-to-date packages for as many users as possible. I would like [ ]
I was in Prague last month for the 2017 edition of the KVM Forum. There I gave a talk about some of the work that I ve been doing this year to improve the qcow2 file format used by QEMU for storing disk images. The focus of my work is to make qcow2 faster and to [ ]
When choosing a disk image format for your virtual machine one of the factors to take into considerations is its I/O performance. In this post I ll talk a bit about the internals of qcow2 and about one of the aspects that can affect its performance under QEMU: its consistency checks. As you probably know, qcow2 [ ]
QEMU 2.6 was released a few days ago. One new feature that I have been working on is the new way to configure I/O limits in disk drives to allow bursts and increase the responsiveness of the virtual machine. In this post I ll try to explain how it works. The basic settings First I will [ ]