[elbe-devel] My initvm is growing with every build until my storage is full

[Olivier Dion]

On Sat, 01 Aug 2020, Martin Petzold <martin.petzold at tavla.de> wrote:
> Am 31.07.20 um 04:45 schrieb Olivier Dion:
>> On Thu, 30 Jul 2020, Martin Petzold <martin.petzold at tavla.de> wrote:
>>> Dear all,
>>>
>>> what is going wrong: my initvm is growing with every build until my
>>> storage is full. Builds are successful and there are no projects left
>>> (list_projects). This was not the case before.
>>>
>>> COMMAND: elbe initvm --skip-build-bin --skip-build-sources --output
>>> ./target/xyz submit ./src/elbe/xyz/live.xml
>>>
>> Yeahh .. I saw that too on my drive.  I can investigate what's taking so
>> much space.  But I think that it's QEMU that is making huge holes in its
>> image.  If you're using the latest Elbe version, you can delete your
>> image and rebuild it in an instant because of COW.
>
> Is this fixed when I delete and then create initvm with ELBE 12.5?

If you create an initvm with the latest Elbe, the image used by your
initvm (initvm.img) is a COW image of a base image (initvm-base.img).
And so you can safely delete this image (initvm.img) and make another
one from the base (initvm-base.img) in an instant.

Also, if you do that, you will lose all modifications that you've made
on your initvm since its creation (e.g. apt-install).  You could
probably merge your initvm into the base image, I'm pretty sure that
QEMU is smart enough to not merge the holes in the base image.

Hope that answer your questions.

-- 
Olivier Dion
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