qubes-doc/developer/system/storage-pools.md

lang	layout	permalink	ref	title
en	doc	/doc/storage-pools/	57	Storage Pools

Qubes OS R3.2 introduced the concept of storage drivers and pools. This feature was a first step towards a saner storage API, which is heavily rewritten in R4. See here for documentation on storage pools in R4.

A storage driver provides a way to store VM images in a Qubes OS system. Currently, the default driver is xen which is the default way of storing volume images as files in a directory tree like /var/lib/qubes/.

A storage pool driver can be identified either by the driver name with the driver key or by the class name like this: class=qubes.storage.xen.XenStorage. Because R3.2 doesn't use Python setup_hooks, to actually use a short driver name for a custom storage driver, you have to patch qubes-core-admin. You can use the class config key instead, when your class is accessible by import in Python.

A pool (in R3.2) is configuration information which can be referenced when creating a new VM. Each pool is saved in storage.conf. It has a name, a storage driver and some driver specific configuration attached.

When installed, the system has, as you can see from the contents of /etc/qubes/storage.conf, a pool named default. It uses the driver xen. The default pool is special in R3.2. It will add dir_path=/var/lib/qubes configuration value from defaults[pool_config], if not overwritten.

Currently the only supported driver out of the box is xen. The benefit of pools (besides that you can write your own storage driver e.g. for Btrfs) in R3.2 is that you can store your domains in multiple places.

You can add a pool to storage.conf like this:

[foo]
driver=xen
dir_path=/opt/qubes-vm

Now, when creating a new VM on the command-line, you may pass the -Pfoo argument to qvm-create to have the VM images stored in pool foo. See also qvm-create --help.

While the current API is not as clean and beautiful as the R4 API, it allows you to write your own storage drivers e.g. for Btrfs today.