KubeVirt allows running virtual machines using a disk provided by an image,
a feature known as "container disk".

For more information, refer to this [link](https://kubevirt.io/user-guide/storage/disks_and_volumes/#containerdisk).

Additionally, KubeVirt supports configuring custom kernel and initrd binaries using
external image.

More details can be found [here](https://kubevirt.io/user-guide/user_workloads/boot_from_external_source/#booting-from-external-source).

At the time these features were developed, Kubernetes did not have a native method to mount OCI images as volumes in pods.

As a result, the current implementation includes some hacky operations and workarounds, such as:- Creating init container to copy the container disk binary.

• Connecting to a socket to determine when virt-handler has finished mounting files to virt-launcher.
• Adding a container to keep the files in the launcher pod.
• Bind-mounting the files from the external images to the compute container’s file system.
• unmounting files when it is no longer needed.
• and more

This enhancement aims to replace the current workaround used for container disks and
kernel boots with Kubernetes native image volume feature.

More details regarding ImageVolume can be found [here](https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/image-volumes/).