It seems that mkimg doesn't support VMDK 5 formats yet. It would be nice if it did: $ cat poc.sh #!/bin/sh set -e rm -Rf root || : mkdir root fetch -o - http://buildbiox.west.isilon.com/snapshots/b.ript.bsd10p2.230/obj.RELEASE/install.tar.gz | \ tar xpzf - -C root # Give us 1GB more space to play with on / fs_size=$(( $(du -s root | awk '{ print $1 }') + 1024 * 1024 * 1024 )) makefs -M $fs_size -o bsize=8192,fsize=1024 root.md root mkimg -f vmdk \ -s gpt -b root/boot/pmbr -p freebsd-boot:=root/boot/gptboot -p freebsd-ufs:=root.md \ -o b.ript.bsd10p2.230.release.vmdk This is a placeholder bug for the requested enhancement. I don't know where the format file's docs are, but it might be doable for either Juniper, Isilon, or someone else to implement the enhancement.
What exactly is not working? Put differently: why is version 5 support needed or desirable? It’s impossible to make changes to mkimg without knowing what problem is being solved and thus without a way to test that the change is good. So let's collect evidence for why VMDK 5 is good to have and when we have it "overwhelmingly", adding VMDK 5 shouldn't be too hard. See also: https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vddk/vmdk_50_technote.pdf
(In reply to Marcel Moolenaar from comment #1) Sorry for not adding more context sooner. It's been a busy day. Basically, there are some features like the "Stream-Optimized Compressed" support which is a performance enhancement ("sparse VMDKs for networks").
Marcel, Totally needed. I haven't checked recently but I think pfSense may even be shipping their virtual appliance this way. I use VMDK streamOptimized to get FreeBSD VMs down to a reasonable size for archival. You may want to look at: http://sanbarrow.com/vmdk-handbook.html cheers Bruce
Reset assignee as Marcel has handed in his commit bit