=head1 NAME

guestfs-release-notes - libguestfs Release Notes

=head1 RELEASE NOTES FOR LIBGUESTFS 1.20

These release notes only cover the differences from the previous
stable/dev branch split (1.18.0).  For detailed changelogs, please see
the git repository, or the ChangeLog file distributed in the tarball.

=head2 New features

=head3 libvirt and sVirt (SELinux confinement)

You can I<optionally> use libvirt to launch and manage the backend
appliance by:

=over 4

=item *

setting C<LIBGUESTFS_ATTACH_METHOD=libvirt[:URI]>

=item *

using C<./configure --with-default-attach-method=libvirt[:URI]>

=item *

or calling the API method C<guestfs_set_attach_method>

=back

SVirt (SELinux confinement) is used to secure the libguestfs
appliance, if the libvirt backend is selected.

=head3 virtio-scsi, larger number of drives, hotplugging

Virtio-scsi is now used by default, if it is available.  This greatly
increases the number of drives that can be added to a single
libguestfs handle (up to 255).

You can now hotplug drives (add and remove drives after launch).

Libguestfs can now handle E<gt> 25 disks, in all APIs, tools and tests.

You can label drives when adding them, then refer to them by label
(F</dev/disk/guestfs/LABEL>) instead of having to use device names
(F</dev/sda>).

=head3 new library features

POSIX Access Control Lists (ACLs) and Linux filesystem capabilities
can now be read and written through the API.

Windows Dynamic Disks are now supported.  The metadata can only be
read (volumes cannot be modified or created).  However the
data/filesystems in the volumes themselves can be mounted, read and
written (Matthew Booth).

Hivex (Windows Registry editing) is now directly supported through the
API, making reading or editing the Windows Registry much more
efficient.

Several libguestfs APIs were reimplemented so they no longer have any
limits on output.  The reimplemented APIs are: C<guestfs_cat>,
C<guestfs_find>, C<guestfs_read_file>, C<guestfs_read_lines>,
C<guestfs_write>, C<guestfs_write_append>, C<guestfs_lstatlist>,
C<guestfs_lxattrlist>, C<guestfs_readlinklist>, C<guestfs_ls>.

=head3 virt tools

C<guestfish touch 'win:c:\new_file'> now works as expected.

C<guestfish> has a new I<--network> option, which enables the user
network in libguestfs.

You can set C<GUESTFISH_PS1> to use fancy prompts in C<guestfish>.

C<rsync>, C<ssh>, C<less> and C<lrzip> commands are now available in
virt-rescue.  In addition, C<rsync> can be used through the API for
doing incremental copies.

C<virt-sparsify> uses qcow2 v3 for increased efficiency.

C<virt-sysprep> enhancements:

=over 4

=item *

generate new UUIDs for PVs and VGs

=item *

remove the local machine ID (Wanlong Gao)

=item *

remove ABRT data (Wanlong Gao)

=item *

remove puppet keys and log files (Wanlong Gao)

=item *

remove process accounting files (Wanlong Gao)

=item *

new I<--firstboot> parameter allowing firstboot scripts
for customizing guests

=item *

remove HOSTNAME field from C<ifcfg-eth*> files (Wanlong Gao)

=item *

miscellaneous improvements for SuSE (Olaf Hering)

=item *

remove man pages cache (Wanlong Gao)

=item *

remove crash data generated by kexec-tools (Wanlong Gao)

=back

C<virt-make-fs> can now create virtual floppy disks (VFDs).

C<guestmount> has a I<--pid-file> option, which can be used to avoid a
race condition between unmounting the filesystem and using the
underlying disk image.

=head3 language bindings

Full-featured Lua bindings have been added in this release
(thanks to Jerome Vuarand for many suggestions).

In Ruby, optional arguments hash is optional.

In Python, optional arguments now don't use special "sentinel"
values, so any integer can be passed as an optional argument.

Erlang bindings now come with examples and tests.

Erlang bindings now handle 64 bit integer parameters correctly.

The automated 'bindtests' now test for 64 bit cleanliness in parameter
passing.  Several bugs in the bindings were found and fixed as a
result.

Better handling of blocking and non-blocking functions should make
libguestfs calls more efficient.

=head3 inspection

Windows guests with unlimited-sized Registries are now supported.
By adding the hivex API to the libguestfs API, it is much more
efficient and easier to inspect and modify the Windows Registry
in guests.

Better support for SuSE guests (Olaf Hering).

Return the architecture of installed applications (John Eckersberg).

Windows 8 is now supported.

Fedora 18 is now supported.

Inspection of ISOs/CDs/DVDs can now use the libosinfo database.

=head3 ports

Libguestfs without the appliance can be compiled on Mac OS X
(Masami HIRATA).

RHEL 5 is now explicitly supported through the 'oldlinux' branch
in upstream git.

PowerPC 64 bit is now supported.  Also libguestfs has been
examined for endianness bugs and these have been fixed.

=head3 daemon

A man page for the daemon (L<guestfsd(8)>) is included.

=head2 Security

=head3 guestfish history file

The F<$HOME/.guestfish> history file is now created with 0600
permissions (instead of 0644 before) so it is no longer world
readable.

=head3 CVE-2012-2690

Old versions of both C<virt-edit> and the C<guestfish> C<edit> command
created a new file containing the changes but did not set the
permissions, etc of the new file to match the old one.  The result
of this was that if you edited a security sensitive file such as
F</etc/shadow> then it would be left world-readable after the edit.

This issue was assigned CVE-2012-2690, and is fixed in libguestfs E<ge> 1.16.

For further information, see
L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=788642>

=head2 New APIs

 acl-delete-def-file
 acl-get-file
 acl-set-file
 canonical-device-name
 cap-get-file
 cap-set-file
 create-flags
 device-index
 disk-has-backing-file
 disk-format
 disk-virtual-size
 filesystem-available
 fill-dir
 fstrim
 get-cachedir
 get-libvirt-requested-credentials
 get-libvirt-requested-credential-prompt
 get-libvirt-requested-credential-challenge
 get-libvirt-requested-credential-defresult
 get-tmpdir
 hivex-close
 hivex-commit
 hivex-node-add-child
 hivex-node-children
 hivex-node-delete-child
 hivex-node-get-child
 hivex-node-get-value
 hivex-node-name
 hivex-node-parent
 hivex-node-set-value
 hivex-node-values
 hivex-open
 hivex-root
 hivex-value-key
 hivex-value-type
 hivex-value-utf8
 hivex-value-value
 inspect-list-applications2 (John Eckersberg)
 list-ldm-volumes
 list-ldm-partitions
 ldmtool-create-all
 ldmtool-diskgroup-disks
 ldmtool-diskgroup-name
 ldmtool-diskgroup-volumes
 ldmtool-remove-all
 ldmtool-scan
 ldmtool-scan-devices
 ldmtool-volume-hint
 ldmtool-volume-partitions
 ldmtool-volume-type
 ls0
 max-disks
 mke2fs (Wanlong Gao)
 mklost-and-found
 mkswap [added label and uuid optional arguments]
 mktemp (Wanlong Gao)
 nr-devices
 parse-environment
 parse-environment-list
 rm-f
 rsync
 rsync-in
 rsync-out
 set-cachedir
 set-libvirt-supported-credentials
 set-libvirt-requested-credential
 set-tmpdir
 shutdown [backported to 1.16 and 1.18]
 tar-in [added compress flag]
 tar-out [added compress, numericowner, excludes flags]
 umount [added force and lazy optional arguments]
 utsname
 xfs-admin (Wanlong Gao)
 xfs-growfs (Wanlong Gao)
 xfs-info (Wanlong Gao)
 xfs-repair (Wanlong Gao)

In the C API only:

 guestfs_push_error_handler
 guestfs_pop_error_handler

=head2 Internals

qemu E<ge> 1.1 is required (E<ge> 1.2 preferred).

febootstrap E<ge> 3.20 is required.

libvirt is optional, but if you want to use the new libvirt
backend for launching the appliance then libvirt E<ge> 0.10.2 would
be required.

Coverity has been run over the complete codebase, and many
issues fixed (thanks Ondrej Vasik, Kamil Dudka).

Functions which previously had no optargs can now be converted to ones
with optargs, making extending the API much more flexible.  Source and
binary backwards compatibility is preserved for users of the API.

The way that libguestfs APIs and structures are represented in the
generator has changed to use an OCaml struct instead of a tuple.  This
makes generator descriptions more flexible and easier to understand.
For details see commits 39d1a7db and eb185eef.

Separation of the library code into more files:

=over 4

=item *

Launch backends are now located in separate files
eg. F<src/launch-appliance.c>, C<src/launch-libvirt.c>.

=item *

Generated action code is now split over several F<src/action*.c>
files, for faster compilation.

=item *

The huge F<src/guestfs.c> file is now split into smaller logical
units.

=back

POD (documentation) is now generated using a rewritten Perl
program instead of pod2* + shell scripts.

Man pages now contain stable dates (Hilko Bengen).

Skipped tests now exit with code 77, so they appear as
C<SKIP:> in C<make check> output.

The parallel mount-local test has been rewritten in C (RHBZ#838081).

Ruby 1.8.5 is now supported (though Ruby E<ge> 1.9 is preferred).

Perl bindings can be disabled via C<./configure --disable-perl>
(Wulf C. Krueger).  Note that Perl is still required in order to build
libguestfs.

Java bindings are now enabled/disabled using C<./configure --with-java>
or C<./configure --without-java> (Wulf C. Krueger).

New configure options C<./configure --enable-code-profiling> and
C<./configure --enable-code-coverage>.

Multiple fixes to use of 64 bit integers in language bindings.

The appliance backend now uses sgabios instead of vgabios
(Dan Berrange).

The C<./run> script now sets enough environment variables that you
can run OCaml, Python, Ruby, Java, GJS, Erlang, Lua programs.

C<./run --test> flag for running tests with minimal output.  It also
prints the time taken to run each test.

The C<./run> script now builds up paths cumulatively, meaning that you
can use C<./run> twice, or use the libguestfs and libvirt C<./run>
scripts together.

You can extract a list of external commands required by the
daemon, making building the appliance on certain distros easier
(Olaf Hering).

The C<virt-rescue> command is now tested during C<make check>.

The generator now removes unused generated files.  This helps
when going back and forth with git rebase, git bisect, etc.

Tests now run in a separate toplevel C<tmp/> directory in the source.
This allows the directory to be labelled for SELinux (sVirt), and also
makes it easier to clean up.

C<make syntax-check> now works to a greater extent, and many problems
in the main code that were found by syntax-check have been fixed
(thanks Jim Meyering).

Emacs mode (-*- foo -*-) has been added to generated files.

Progress bar output is now sent to F</dev/tty> so it doesn't end up in
the regular output of the program.  virt-resize and virt-sparsify now
suppress progress bars if stdout is not a tty.

There is now a C<./configure --without-libvirt> option.  This is
useful for testing that the code still compiles without libvirt.

There is now an internal mini-library for running commands.  This
allows us to redirect errors from external commands into events.

Code for handling temporary directories and the appliance cache was
completely overhauled.

Code for temporarily ignoring/disabling errors now looks like this:

 guestfs_push_error_handler (g, NULL, NULL);
 guestfs_mkdir (g, "/foo"); /* We don't care if this fails. */
 guestfs_pop_error_handler (g);

The C<tests/extra> directory has gone.  The "extra tests" are now
split into separately runnable targets, such as C<make check-valgrind>.
Use C<make help> to get a summary of the targets.

The C<lpj> option is passed to the appliance kernel when using TCG.
This should improve clock stability (thanks Marcelo Tosatti,
Olaf Hering).

=head2 Bugs fixed

=begin comment

./bugs-in-changelog.sh 1.18.0..

=end comment

=over 4

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/882417>

libguestfs tools fail with odd error messages if TMPDIR is not an absolute path

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/882299>

Windows 8 guest disks can't be mounted: "The NTFS partition is in an unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation or fast restarting), or mount the volume read-only with the 'ro' mount option."

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/881953>

libguestfs: migration to /etc/hostname, /etc/vconsole.conf, /etc/locale.conf

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/880801>

virt-df with two -a options displays incorrect disk image name

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/879416>

libguestfs-test-tool pauses when you use --help option

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/876579>

mke2fs API does not apply block device naming translation to journaldevice optarg

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/860235>

SELinux policy ought to allow qemu to write to unconfined_u:object_r:user_tmp_t:s0

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/859949>

RFE: inspect-list-applications does not return the architecture of RPM packages

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/859885>

inspect-list-applications does not list all installed RPM packages with same name and different versions

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/859876>

guestfish printed paths are not canonicalized

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/859875>

Progress bar output should go to tty(?) stderr(?)

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/858696>

virt-sysprep reports Guestfs.Error("read_lines: fopen: /etc/sysconfig/network: No such file or directory") on some Fedora guests

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/858128>

libguestfs fail to list devices added by add-drive-ro-with-if twice

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/858126>

virt-inspector fail to work with some windows guests

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/853762>

virt-sparsify should use a more robust method to detect the input format

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/853393>

libvirt doesn't label console, serial sockets

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/853159>

virt-rescue in Fedora 18 is completely broken

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/852394>

libguestfs inspection limits registries to 100 MiB

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/852194>

virt-sparsify --compress fails if output is raw format

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/847881>

RFE: allow extra arguments (like --exclude) to tar-out

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/847880>

tar-out should allow (or force) --numeric-owner

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/845522>

guestfish "copy-out / localdir" command fails with "No such file or directory"

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/845488>

Long filenames on NTFS cause tar-out, copy-out etc to fail with error "Cannot open: File name too long"

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/842307>

RFE: Need help designing and implementing selinux policy for libguestfs/sVirt

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/840572>

virt-make-fs / tar-in should support vfat properly

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/840115>

guestfish touch problem - case_sensitive_path API expects the file to exist

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/836710>

Data loss when writing to qcow2-format disk files

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/834712>

lvresize, lvresize-free fail unnecessarily if you don't change the size of the LV: "New size (nn extents) matches existing size (nn extents)"

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/824716>

compress-device-out didn't support bzip2

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/824043>

guestfish unrecognized mount option gives confusing error message

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/823887>

Filenames containing Chinese characters can't be created on vfat filesystems

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/823885>

virt-make-fs cannot create vfat filesystem containing filesystems with Chinese characters

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/823883>

virt-make-fs -t fat fails with an obscure error message

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/823821>

Inspection fails when /etc/HOSTNAME is empty

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/801117>

libguestfs cannot get icon for Windows 8

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/798979>

Ubuntu install CDs from oneiric onwards are not recognized: "multi-boot operating systems are not supported"

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/782167>

libguestfs doesn't recognize Windows Dynamic disks in some configurations, eg. spanned

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/713678>

Not all febootstrap messages are redirected to log callbacks

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/627675>

libguestfs inspector code cannot handle /dev/disk/by-id/* paths

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/602997>

part-get-bootable gives wrong result with an unordered part layout

=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.
