> Prefer the container way and want multi-arch support? You can then convert the container disks into vms.
The prior step is a lossy conversion, though; there are things arbitrary VMs can know about/control, that OCI container images cannot. Like UEFI, or host core affinity, or the layout of the guest’s physical memory, or host disk storage formatting, or nonstandard behavior for paravirtualized devices like NICs.
Ideally the conversion from VM to OCI image would have some sort of standard + portable schema for encoding this type of VM “pragma” info as latent metadata — which container runtimes would ignore, but which a back-conversion into a VM could pick up and translate into hypervisor-specific VM config.
I think, if that was done, then OCI images would indeed become the only portable format you need for any type of container or VM.
The prior step is a lossy conversion, though; there are things arbitrary VMs can know about/control, that OCI container images cannot. Like UEFI, or host core affinity, or the layout of the guest’s physical memory, or host disk storage formatting, or nonstandard behavior for paravirtualized devices like NICs.
Ideally the conversion from VM to OCI image would have some sort of standard + portable schema for encoding this type of VM “pragma” info as latent metadata — which container runtimes would ignore, but which a back-conversion into a VM could pick up and translate into hypervisor-specific VM config.
I think, if that was done, then OCI images would indeed become the only portable format you need for any type of container or VM.