=head1 NAME

guestfs-release-notes - libguestfs Release Notes

=head1 RELEASE NOTES FOR LIBGUESTFS 1.38

These release notes only cover the differences from the previous
stable/dev branch split (1.36.0).  For detailed changelogs, please see
the git repository, or the ChangeLog file distributed in the tarball.

=head2 New features

=head3 New tools

Virt-builder-repository is a new tool allowing end users to create and
update virt-builder repositories (Cédric Bosdonnat).

Virt-rescue (while not a new tool) has been substantially rewritten,
implementing job control, I<-m> and I<-i> options, escape keys, etc.

=head3 New features in existing tools

Virt-builder planner has been improved so that faster and more
efficient build plans are chosen for complex cases, especially when
either the tmpdir or output is on networked storage.

New virt-builder Fedora templates (starting with Fedora 26) will have
plain partition layout and use GPT for partitions.

Virt-customize "firstboot" scripts in guests using systemd are now
installed under the C<multi-user.target> instead of C<default.target>
so they will only run when the system is booted normally.

Virt-customize now sets a random F</etc/machine-id> for Linux guests,
if one is not already set.

Virt-df now works correctly on filesystems with block sizes smaller
than 1K (Nikolay Ivanets).

Virt-dib has further compatibility enhancements with diskimage-builder
(Pino Toscano).

Virt-sysprep removes C<DHCP_HOSTNAME> from F<ifcfg-*> files.

Virt-sysprep now works on Oracle Linux (Jamie Iles).

Virt-resize now correctly copies GPT partition attributes from the
source to the destination (Cédric Bosdonnat).

Bash tab completion implemented or enhanced for: virt-win-reg,
virt-v2v-copy-to-local.

=head3 virt-v2v and virt-p2v

Virt-v2v can now read VMware VMX files directly, either from local
disk, NFS storage, or over SSH from an ESXi hypervisor.

Virt-v2v can now use VDDK as an input source.

Both virt-v2v and virt-p2v are now able to pass through the source CPU
vendor, model and topology.  However unfortunately not all source and
target hypervisors are able to provide or consume this data at
present (Tomáš Golembiovský).

Virt-v2v now supports encrypted guests (Pino Toscano).

Virt-v2v can now handle VMware snapshots.  Note that the snapshots are
collapsed — it I<does not> convert the chain of snapshots into a chain
of snapshots.

Virt-v2v now installs Windows 10 / Windows Server 2016 virtio block
drivers correctly (Pavel Butsykin, Kun Wei).

Virt-v2v now installs virtio-rng, balloon and pvpanic drivers, and
correctly sets this in the target hypervisor metadata for hypervisors
which support that (Tomáš Golembiovský).

Virt-v2v now installs both legacy and modern virtio keys in the
Windows registry (Ladi Prosek).

Virt-p2v can now preserve (in some cases) the offset of the Real Time
Clock from UTC.

Virt-p2v now combines several scp commands to the conversion server
into a single command, improving conversion times.

Virt-v2v now detects the special Linux Xen PV-only kernels correctly
(Laszlo Ersek).

Virt-v2v I<-o glance> now generates the right properties for UEFI
guests (Pino Toscano).

Virt-v2v I<-o null> now avoids spooling the guest to a temporary file,
instead it writes to the qemu "null block device".  This makes it
faster and use almost no disk space.

Virt-v2v I<-o rhv> now supports Windows 2016 Server guest type.

Virt-v2v I<-i libvirtxml> can now open network disks over http or
https.

Virt-v2v will now give a warning about host passthrough devices (Pino
Toscano).

The virt-v2v I<--machine-readable> output has been enhanced so it
includes C<vcenter-https>, C<xen-ssh> and C<in-place> facts (Pino
Toscano).

=head3 Language bindings

Fix multiple memory leaks and other data corruption problems in the
Java bindings (Pino Toscano).

Perl C<%guestfs_introspection> has been dropped.

=head3 Inspection

Inspection support was rewritten in OCaml and included inside the
daemon.  This makes inspection considerably faster, more robust and
more easily extensible in future.

Better icon support for ALT Linux guests (Pino Toscano).

Better support for NeoKylin (Qingzheng Zhang).

Can handle OSes like Void Linux which do not include C<VERSION_ID>
in F</etc/os-release> (Pino Toscano).

Add support for Microsoft MS-DOS (Daniel Berrangé).

=head3 Architectures and platforms

Multiple fixes for S/390 architecture.  Libguestfs and all the tools
should now compile and run on this architecture.

=head3 Other

The libguestfs API is now thread-safe (although not parallel).  You
can call APIs on the same handle from multiple threads without needing
to take a lock.

=head2 Security

There were multiple vulnerabilities in the icoutils C<wrestool>
program which is run by libguestfs to create icons for Windows guests.
Using the latest C<wrestool> is recommended.

=head2 API

=head3 New APIs

=over 4

=item C<hivex_value_string>

This replaces the deprecated C<hivex_value_utf8> API, but does the
same thing.

=item C<part_get_gpt_attributes>

=item C<part_set_gpt_attributes>

Read and write GPT partition attribute flags (Cédric Bosdonnat).

=item C<part_resize>

Enlarge or shrink an existing partition (Nikos Skalkotos).

=item C<yara_destroy>

=item C<yara_load>

=item C<yara_scan>

Support for the Yara malware scanning engine (Matteo Cafasso).

=back

=head3 Other API changes

APIs implemented in the daemon can now be written in either C or
OCaml.  Several APIs were rewritten in OCaml, although we are not
planning to rewrite all of them.

You will now get a clear error message if you try to add too many
disks to the appliance, instead of getting a peculiar failure from
qemu.

Certain APIs accidentally allowed you to use C</dev/urandom> as an
input "device", eg. C<g.copy_device_to_device("/dev/urandom",
"/dev/sda")>.  The code has been modified to I<forbid> this usage.

All APIs for inspecting installer CDs have been deprecated.  Use
libosinfo for this task.

=head2 Build changes

A working OCaml compiler E<ge> 4.01 is now required for building
libguestfs.  The C<./configure --disable-ocaml> option remains but is
only used to disable the OCaml language bindings.

Add C<RELEASES> file which lists release dates for each version of
libguestfs.  You must update this file when making a new release.

Documentation generated by C<gtk-doc> has been removed.  C<./configure
--enable-gtk-doc> now does nothing.

Libtirpc is now used for XDR functions and rpcgen.  Note that glibc
has deprecated and in most Linux distros dropped these, so for most
people this will be an extra dependency (Martin Kletzander).

Libxcrypt is now used for L<crypt(3)>.  This is required if using
glibc E<ge> 2.27.

C<ocaml-hivex> is now required.

Libvirt E<ge> 1.2.20 is now required.

There is now a C<make check-root> target for tests which need to be
run as root (analogous to C<make check-slow>).

C<./configure>-time check for C<__attribute__((cleanup))> now works in
the cross-compilation case (Yann E. Morin).

The C<AUTHORS> and C<p2v/about-authors.c> files are now generated from
a single place.

Either GnuPG v1 or v2 can be used.

C<./configure --with-guestfs-path> may be used to set the default
C<LIBGUESTFS_PATH>.  In addition the way that the path is searched has
changed slightly so that all types of appliances are searched in each
path element separately (Pavel Butsykin).

C<GUESTFSD_EXT_CMD> which was used to mark external commands in the
daemon has been removed.  It was originally used by SUSE builds, but
they have not been using it for a while.

The output from C<./configure> is now visually grouped under headings
related to what it is doing, making it much easier to scan (Pino
Toscano).

OCaml dependencies are now generated from a single script instead of
multiple not-quite-the-same Makefile fragments.

C<./configure --with-distro=ID> can be used to override automatic
Linux distro detection at build time (Pino Toscano).

qemu E<ge> 2.10 is supported (but not required).  This adds mandatory
locking to disks and libguestfs turns this off in certain
circumstances when it is known to be safe (Lars Seipel, Peter Krempa,
Daniel Berrangé, Pino Toscano, Fam Zheng, Yongkui Guo, Václav
Kadlčík).

=head2 Internals

Most common code has been moved to the F<common/> subdirectory, with
OCaml common code being in F<common/ml*> directories (eg.
F<common/visit> and F<common/mlvisit> contain the visitor library in C
and OCaml respectively).  The F<mllib> directory has been deleted and
replaced by F<common/mltools>.

There is now a lightweight OCaml binding for PCRE, see
F<common/mlpcre>.  Use of OCaml C<Str> library has been mostly
replaced with PCRE.

Add more calls to C<udev_settle> to improve stability of partition
code (Dawid Zamirski).

Run C<udev_settle> with I<--exit-if-exists> option, which improves the
speed of this command (Pavel Butsykin).

Detect new locations of L<major(3)>, L<minor(3)>, L<makedev(3)>.

Actions can now be deprecated with no suggested replacement, for APIs
such as C<guestfs_wait_ready> that should simply be removed from
client code.

Use gnulib C<set_nonblocking_flag> wrapper instead of calling
L<fcntl(2)> with C<O_NONBLOCK> (Eric Blake).  Similarly
C<set_cloexec_flag>.

Fix memory leak in XFS version of C<guestfs_vfs_minimum_size> (Pino
Toscano).

Valgrind checks now run on the virt-p2v binary.

Unicode single quotes (C<‘’>) and now used in place of C<''> or C<`'>
throughout the code and documentation.  Similarly for C<’s> instead of
C<'s>.

The C<is_zero> function has been reimplemented for greater speed (Eric
Blake).

In the direct backend, virtio-blk support has been removed.
Virtio-scsi is now the only supported way to add disks.

Generator string parameter and return types have been rationalised so
there are only two types (C<String>, C<StringList>) with many subtypes
eg. C<FileIn> becomes C<String (FileIn, ...)>.

The appliance disk image can now be in formats other than raw
(Pavel Butsykin).

Multiple improvements to how we automatically build Debian templates
for virt-builder (Pino Toscano).  Enable serial console for these
templates (Florian Klink).

In the daemon, instead of making a private copy of lvm.conf and
modifying it (eg for filters), start with an empty file since LVM
understands that to mean "all defaults" (Alasdair Kergon, Zdenek
Kabelac).

The C<direct> backend can now run QMP queries against the QEMU binary,
enhancing the kinds of information we can detect.  In addition the
code to query QEMU has been made more robust for handling multiple
parallel queries of different versions of QEMU.

OCaml Augeas bindings are bundled under F<common/mlaugeas>.  The long
term plan is to remove this and use system ocaml-augeas when it is
more widely available in distros (Pino Toscano).

All OCaml modules (C<*.ml> files) are now required to have an
interface file (C<*.mli>).  If they don't export anything then the
interface will be empty except for comments.

Certain OCaml features in OCaml E<ge> 4.01 are used throughout the
code, including replacing ‘{ field = field }’ with ‘{ field }’.

Virt-builder C<make-template> utility now uses the C<virt-install
--transient> option so that we should never need to clean up left over
domains after a crash.  It also saves kickstarts and virt-install
commands, which are committed to git for future reference.

F</dev/shm> is now created in the appliance (Nicolas Hicher).

In verbose mode on Fedora guests, virt-customize will now use C<dnf
--verbose> enabling better debugging output.

Virt-v2v input and output classes now contain a C<#precheck> method
which is used to perform environmental checks before conversion
starts.

Virt-p2v enables miniexpect debugging.  It is written to stderr (of
virt-p2v).

Virt-v2v free space checks are more liberal especially for smaller
guests (Pino Toscano).

=head2 Bugs fixed

=begin comment

https_proxy= ./bugs-in-changelog.sh v1.36.0..

=end comment

=over 4

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1540535>

Example URI of "Convert from ESXi hypervisor over SSH to local libvirt" is incorrect in v2v man page

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1539395>

virt-customize segfaults after upgrading to 1.37.35-3

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1536765>

Libguestfs Perl bindings can leak a small amount of memory on error

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1536763>

libguestfs Lua bindings use strerror(), which isn’t thread safe

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1536603>

man page makes no mention of using '--' when trying to change exit on error behavior

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1525241>

virt-df displays zeros for filesystems with block size =512

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1519204>

v2v should improve the result when convert a rhel7.4 guest with no available kernels found in the bootloader

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1518517>

virt-v2v fails with "unsupported configuration: shared access for  disk 'sdb' requires use of supported storage format"

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1516094>

Mere presence of QEMU file locking options breaks NBD (Block protocol 'nbd' doesn't support the option 'locking')

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1514756>

./configure --disable-ocaml breaks building common/mlpcre which breaks building daemon

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1513884>

[RFE]Should update some vddk info in v2v man page

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1508874>

virt-v2v: warning: ova disk has an unknown VMware controller type (20)

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1506572>

virt-v2v '-i ova' is not parsing the MAC address from the source OVF

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1506511>

virt-builder fails to parse repo file if it has blank space after the repository identifier

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1503958>

Failed to convert the rhel5 guest with kmod-xenpv installed from xen server by virt-v2v

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1503497>

qemu-kvm fails to open qcow2 files in read-only mode with qemu-kvm 1.5.3

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1500673>

Error info shows wrong sometimes when ssh to conversion server using non-root user with sudo on p2v client

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1500537>

/dev/shm does not exist in the appliance environment

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1497475>

guestfish cannot list commands from interactive mode

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1493048>

Unbound constructor Hivex.OPEN_UNSAFE

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1484957>

bump debian images to use single-partition layout

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1482737>

virt-resize failed to expand swap partition for RHEL5.11 guest image with "parsing UUID failed"

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1477623>

Running file API on a special chardev may hang forever

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1476081>

inspect-os  report error: could not parse integer in version number: V7Update2

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1472719>

[RFE]Add warning in process of v2v converting guest which has pci passthrough device

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1472208>

virt-v2v fails on opensuse 13.2 guest with error: statns: statns_stub: path must start with a / character

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1469655>

firstboot scripts are not correctly installed in Fedora 26

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1466563>

Libguestfs should pass copyonread flag through to the libvirt XML

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1465665>

1.36.x build failure: gtkdocize fails using newer autotools due to missing GTK_DOC_CHECK in configure.ac

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1460338>

guestfs_shutdown hangs if main process sets signal handlers

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1459979>

guestfs_add_domain_argv fails with readonly option when vdi/vhd disk is attached to libvirt domain

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1451665>

RFE: Virt-v2v can't convert the guest which has encrypted partition

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1450325>

document URI format for -a parameters of tools

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1448739>

RFE: Support multicore decompression for OVA files using pigz and pxz

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1447202>

Win 2016 guest is described as Win 10 after imported to RHEVM

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1441197>

RFE: ability to convert VMware virtual machines via vmx

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1438939>

Please drop or update GnuPG (1.4.x) dependency

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1438794>

[RFE] Install Windows virtio-rng drivers on VMs imported

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1433937>

virt-inspector can't get icon info from altlinux-centaurus

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1433577>

policycoreutils setfiles >= 2.6 does .. nothing

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1431579>

Windows 8 UEFI from VMware to KVM fails to boot after conversion

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1430680>

There is error info about "No such file or directory" when convert a guest from ova file by v2v

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1430184>

virt-dib should generate sha256 checksum instead of sha512

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1429506>

RFE: OVMF should be detected on conversion server to prevent failed conversion

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1429491>

Should rename network name of rhv in virt-v2v man page

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1427529>

virt-sysprep should remove DHCP_HOSTNAME

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1417306>

QEMU image file locking (libguestfs)

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1409024>

[Debian] Missing db_dump abort inspection

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1406906>

Segmentation fault when reading corrupted path with Python 3 bindings

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1379289>

RFE: virt-p2v should support mnemonic operations

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1378022>

There is virt-v2v warning about <listen type='none'> during converting a guest which has listen type='none' in XML

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1376547>

qemu-system-s390x: -device isa-serial,chardev=charserial0,id=serial0: 'isa-serial' is not a valid device model name

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1374232>

selinux relabel fails on RHEL 6.2 guests with "libguestfs error: selinux_relabel: : Success"

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1367738>

Missing bash completion scripts for: virt-diff guestunmount virt-copy-in virt-copy-out virt-customize virt-get-kernel virt-p2v-make-disk virt-p2v-make-kickstart virt-tar-in virt-tar-out virt-v2v-copy-to-local virt-win-reg

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1362649>

RFE: virt-sysprep does not utilize libguestfs encryption support

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1172425>

[RFE]virt-v2v failed to convert VMware ESX VM with snapshot

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1171654>

Modify a file in virt-rescue with vi on some linux terminal such as yakuake, can lead to abnormal display in virt-rescue shell

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1167623>

Remove "If reporting bugs, run virt-v2v with debugging enabled .." message when running virt-p2v

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1152819>

Can not end a running command in virt-rescue by press ^C or other keys, the only way is to exit virt-rescue

=back

=head1 SEE ALSO

L<guestfs-examples(1)>,
L<guestfs-faq(1)>,
L<guestfs-performance(1)>,
L<guestfs-recipes(1)>,
L<guestfs-testing(1)>,
L<guestfs(3)>,
L<guestfish(1)>,
L<http://libguestfs.org/>

=head1 AUTHOR

Richard W.M. Jones

=head1 COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) 2009-2025 Red Hat Inc.
