Re: BHYVE SNAPSHOT image format proposal

On Fri, Jul 14, 2023 at 9:40 AM Matthew Grooms <mgrooms@shrew.net> wrote:

>
> I see a need to define a format for bhyve so it's possible to mix
> different sections and encodings inside a unified stream. But all the
> data in your nvlist example above can be easily be represented as text.
> We already have JSON, YAML, XML, etc ... By adopting an preexisting
> format, we could retain the snapshot structure instead of lifting it up
> into the stream format. Even if we decide to break the structure up into
> different nvlist stream sections, using a common format would allow
> other tools to more easily parse and validate the structure inside these
> sections. Isn't that a good thing? Is there a reason we're trying to
> reinvent the wheel here?
>

Does JSON support storing binary data? I'm under the impression that it
does not.