Persistent VMs in Podman: Install Alpine to a qcow2 Disk Image

Persistent VMs in Podman: Install Alpine to a Disk Image Quick one-liner: Create a qcow2 disk image with qemu-img, install Alpine Linux into it, and boot from disk — so your VM survives container restarts. Why This Matters Post #2 proved that KVM hardware acceleration is fast. But there's a catch: every time the container stops, the VM state vanishes. The Alpine ISO is read-only — any changes you make inside the VM exist only in RAM. Stop the container and they're gone. That's fine for a boot-speed demo, but it's not a real VM. A real VM has a disk that persists between runs. The disk lives on the host filesystem, the container is just the runtime, and the two are completely independent. Stop and restart the container as many times as you want — the disk doesn't care. This post adds that layer. You'll create a qcow2 disk image, boot from ISO + disk to run the Alpine installer, then boot from disk alone to confirm it survived. Prerequisites qemu:base image from Post #1 Alpine ISO from P