Video: Take your loop mounts to the next level with nbdkit

Loop mounting is popular, but very limited in what it can do on Linux. I gave a talk at FOSDEM on Saturday entitled Better loop mounts with NBD: Take your loop mounts to the next level with nbdkit, and it’s online already!

Download the WebM format or MP4 format files directly.

Also I did subtitles! Download the subtitles directly here. (The subs only cover the first 30 minutes of the talk, not the Summary and Q&A.)

(Thanks to Thomas Huth for the photo)

There are a few small problems and corrections:

1. There’s a part of the talk where I refer to the light blue trimmed blocks. Unfortunately the video feed didn’t capture that, so the light blue looks like white. If you really want to see that then go look at the video in my earlier post.
2. During the Q&A I mentioned that we could support writing to xz files. This is true, sort of, but I forgot that there’s a problem: nbdkit doesn’t support file resizing (and I believe that’s even experimental in the NBD protocol), so someone would have to add that first. There are other serious down-sides to implementing writable XZ, I doubt it could ever be fast.

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For subtitles I used gaupol which is actually quite nice, although subtitling is inherently slow and tedious. It took me a good 4 hours to subtitle 30 minutes of video.

Interview with FOSDEM team about nbdkit loop mounting

I did an email interview which you can read online about my FOSDEM talk about nbdkit loop mounting.

Other FOSDEM 2019 interviews are here.

FOSDEM 2019 – Better loop mounting with NBD

My talk was accepted: https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/nbdkit/

If you’re coming to FOSDEM, please come and say hello. In the meantime if you want to watch a rough early run-through of the talk, see: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/11/26/nbdkit-fosdem-test-presentation/

nbdkit / FOSDEM test presentation about better loop mounts for Linux

I’ve submitted a talk about nbdkit, our flexible pluggable NBD server, to FOSDEM next February. This is going to be about using NBD as a better way to do loop mounts in Linux.

In preparation I gave a very early version of the talk to a small Red Hat audience.

Video link: http://oirase.annexia.org/rwmj.wp.com/rjones-nbdkit-tech-talk-2018-11-19.mp4

Sorry about the slow start. You may want to skip to 2 mins to get past the intro.

Summary of what’s in the talk:

1. Demo of regular, plain loop mounting.
2. Demo of loop mounting an XZ-compressed disk image using NBD + nbdkit.
3. Slides about how loop device compares to NBD.
4. Slides about nbdkit plugins and filters.
5. Using VMware VDDK to access a VMDK file.
6. Creating a giant disk costing EUR 300 million(!)
7. Visualizing a single filesystem.
8. Visualizing RAID 5.
9. Writing a plugin in shell script (live demo).
10. Summary.

FOSDEM 2018 Virtualization devroom

The programme has been published here. Looks pretty good! Lots of Kubernetes/KubeVirt this year.

My 10 minute lightning talk on virt-builder from FOSDEM 2014

My 10 minute lightning talk about virt-builder is available to download now (video).

Since there are a few sound problems early on in the talk, I have also created a subtitles file: Advanced_disk_image_management_with_libguestfs.srt With VLC you can just drop this file into the same directory as the video file, and VLC will automatically display the subs. With other players you might need to load the subs separately.

FOSDEM lightning talk is at 16.00 today

Edit: Thanks everyone for turning up. There was a video recording which will probably be available within two weeks. Unfortunately there were some technical problems with the microphone, but I’ll try and add subtitles once the video is available.