How to manage disk-only snapshots on QEMU?

gcb

2/1/24, 6:52 PM

I'm trying to move my VirtualBox and Docker workflow to QEMU.

On those other systems, I would boot a public linux vm/container, edit to my liking. shut it down, and create a snapshot to then boot and discard changes. So i always have a pristine image to run my tests on.

On QEMU, I can't get to the exact the same workflow or find a good adaptation.

Instead of always saving layers of snapshots and having the option to discard at will, I either have no snapshot (i.e. after shutdown all that is written is written), or I run qemu-system with -snapshot which will always discard changes. The command commit doesn't work as i assumed it would.

Then I have the option to save the vm state, which includes all disk and CPU/MEMORY state to the disk (qcow2) file... by entering the vm monitor and issuing savevm ... command. This is awkward as it makes booting the same image several days later a pain as lots of undesirable state is kept.

How Can i optionally save disk state of a shutdown QEMU machine, or how can I discard accumulated-by-default-layers later on at will?

(ideally from command line alone as I could do with VBoxManage commands)

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EN: How to manage disk-only snapshots on QEMU?

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