Glossary

Advanced Encryption Standard - very fast and secure; the de facto standard for symmetric encryption.

See Also zlib compression.

American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a 7-bit code. ASCII encodes characters as you would enter them into a computer (like this book)

A (typically) read-only disk image which can be used as a starting point for new read-write images.

See Also Snapshot.

Placeholder.

See Also Backing image, Snapshot.

A utility program which concatenates files and print them the standard output.

A utility program which can copy files, converting and formatting them according to the options given by the user.

Software which creates devices from partition tables which you can interact with.

See Also Partition table, kpartx, GParted, Partition.

A utility program which manipulates disk partition tables.

See Also Partition, Partition table.

A utility program which is used to determine file types

A graphical application used for manipulating (creating, resizing, moving, copying) the filesystems of partitions.

An operating system which is installed and ran on emulatd, virtual, or paravirtual hardware which is managed by hypervisor software on the Host OS.

See Also Hypervisor, Host OS.

The running system (server, OS) which provides resources and facilities for running several virtual Guest Operating Systems.

See Also Guest OS.

Software blabla.

A file which virtualization software can use as a hard disk, similar to a snapshot.

See Also Snapshot.

Reads partition tables on a specified device and create device maps over partition segments detected.

See Also Partition.

A utility program which sets up and controls loop devices.

See Also Loop device, .

A command which lists directory contents and file attributes.

The Master Boot Record holds the information on how the logical partitions, containing file systems, are organized on a storage device.

See Also Partition, Partition table.

Data which describes other data; e.g., virtual disk configuration parameters.

A utility program which attaches a filesystem to a directory tree.

See Also umount, Filesystem.

Short for Operating System.

Utility program which manipulates storage partitions

See Also fdisk.

In storage devices, the definition of storage allocation on a device; the capacity of that region is less than or equal to that of the backing storage device; multiple partitions may exist.

Meta-data stored on a storage volume which describes the partition layout, i.e., begin/end locations, types, and other properties.

See Also Device map, kpartx, GParted, Partition, meta-data.

QEMY Copy On Write image format (version 2); improves v1 with few features: snapshots, performance tuning options.

QEMU Copy On Write image format (version 1); supports sparse files, backing files, and encryption.

Virtual disk manipulation tool bundled with the QEMU (Quick Emulator) software collection.

The simplest type of virtual disk format, as the file contains no extra meta-data about itself, often usable without requiring special software.

See Also QCOW, QCOW2, meta-data.

Utility program which can resize ext2, ext3, or ext4 file systems.

An virtual disk feature representing a moment in time, not represented as a disk image.

See Also Backing image, Base-image.

See Also ???TITLE???.

Utility program which detaches the file system(s) mentioned from the file hierarchy.

See Also mount.

general-purpose, patent-free, lossless data compression library.

See Also AES encryption.