How to edit a qcow2 file from C

Suppose you want to edit or read or write the data inside a qcow2 file? One way is to use libguestfs, and that’s the recommended way if you need to mount a filesystem inside the file.

But for accessing the data blocks alone, you can now use the libnbd API and qemu-nbd together and this has a couple of advantages: It’s faster and you can open snapshots (which libguestfs cannot do).

We start by creating a libnbd handle and connecting it to a qemu-nbd instance. The qemu-nbd instance is linked with qemu’s internal drivers that know how to read and write qcow2.

  const char *filename;
  struct nbd_handle *nbd;

  nbd = nbd_create ();
  if (nbd == NULL) {
    fprintf (stderr, "%s\n", nbd_get_error ());
    exit (EXIT_FAILURE);
  }

  char *args[] = {
    "qemu-nbd", "-f", "qcow2",
    // "-s", snapshot,
    (char *) filename,
    NULL
  };
  if (nbd_connect_systemd_socket_activation (nbd, args) == -1) {
    fprintf (stderr, "%s\n", nbd_get_error ());
    exit (EXIT_FAILURE);
  }

Now you can get the virtual size:

  int64_t size = nbd_get_size (nbd);
  printf ("virtual size = %" PRIi64 "\n", size);

Or read and write sectors from the file:

  if (nbd_pread (nbd, buf, sizeof buf, 0, 0) == -1) {
    fprintf (stderr, "%s\n", nbd_get_error ());
    exit (EXIT_FAILURE);
  }

Once you’re done with the file, call nbd_close on the handle which will also shut down the qemu-nbd process.

A complete example can be found here.