18.5 .nbd

The .nbd command opens a new IO space backed by an external NBD server. The syntax is:

.nbd uri

where uri is the name of the newly created buffer, matching the NBD URI specification.

When a new NBD IOS is opened, it becomes the current IO space. See .file.

NBD support in GNU poke is optional, depending on whether poke was compiled against libnbd.

For an example of connecting to the guest-visible content of a qcow2 image, with the default export name as exposed by using qemu as an NBD server:

$ qemu-nbd --socket=/tmp/mysock -f qcow2 image.qcow2
$ poke
(poke) .nbd nbd+unix:///socket=?/tmp/mysock
The current file is now `nbd+unix:///socket=?/tmp/mysock'.