I followed the instructions in this answer to a related question: Add physical disk to KVM virtual machine
The resulting code in the .xml file for the VM is the following:
<disk type='block' device='disk'>
<driver name='qemu' type='raw' cache='none'/>
<source dev='/dev/disk/by-partuuid/d8b63353-34n6-6587-ac07-810dmf36d544'/>
<target dev='vdb' bus='virtio'/>
<boot order='2'/>
<address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x05' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>
</disk>
Notice how I used /dev/disk/by-partuuid/d8b63353-34n6-6587-ac07-810dmf36d544
for the <source>
element, instead of /dev/sda4
.
What is bothering me is that my use case is to pass a partition to QEMU, instead of a disk. I installed Windows 10 on it, the Setup installer wouldn't recognize the storage so I had to load the viostor
driver from the FedoraProject.
The Windows installation went fine, and the performance is amazing, but when the VM is turned off, the host system doesn't recognize the partition format.
I found it interesting that the Windows installer - with the viostor
driver loaded - created the additional partitions normally required by Windows on a bare disk. In other words, it created partitions inside what's supposedly a partition. This shouldn't be possible, or so I thought.
/dev/sda4
is present in the host, but is not recognized as neither an NTFS filesystem (not expected, indeed), nor LVM, nor LDM (tested with ldmtool).
The VM is booting correctly in UEFI mode with the Q35 chipset.
Question: Is my procedure to add a partition to virt-manager correct, or should it only be done for disks - and not for partitions? Also, what partition type or format did I end up with?