The block layer is one of qemu's most complex subsystems, and it has seen a very high and even increasing development activity recently. This talk will give an overview of the features of the block layer and its basic objects, highlighting the changes since last year and outlining some plans for the future.
It will span the whole area from guest devices (IDE, AHCI, virtio-blk/scsi) to block drivers implementing different image formats and protocols (especially qcow2) and background jobs operating on block devices, referring to the more detailed talks that may be given on some of the topics.