This is a fairly straightforward translation of Perl virt-resize into
OCaml. It is bug-for-bug and feature-for-feature identical to the
Perl version, except as noted below.
The motivation is to have a more solid, high-level, statically safe
compiled language to go forwards with fixing some of the harder bugs
in virt-resize. In particular contracts between different parts of
the program are now handled by statically typed structures checked at
compile time, instead of the very ad-hoc unchecked hash tables used by
the Perl version.
OCaml and the ocaml-pcre library (Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions
bindings for OCaml) are required.
Extra features in this version:
- 32 bit hosts are now supported.
- We try hard to handle the case where the target disk is not "clean"
(ie. all zeroes). It usually works for this case, whereas the
previous version would usually fail. However it is still
recommended that the system administrator creates a fresh blank disk
for the target before running the program.
- User messages are a bit more verbose and helpful. You can turn
these off with the -q (--quiet) option.
There is one lost feature:
- Ability to specify >= T (terabytes) sizes in command line size
expressions has been removed. This probably didn't work in the Perl
version.
Other differences:
- The first partition on the target is no longer aligned; instead we
place it at the same sector as on the source. I suspect that
aligning it was causing the bootloader failures.
- Because it's easier, we do more sanity checking on the source disk.
This might lead to more failures, but they'd be failures you'd want
to know about.
- The order in which operations are performed has been changed to make
it more logical. The user should not notice any functional
difference, but debug messages will be quite a bit different.
- virt-resize is a compiled binary, not a script.
Lift the if HAVE_PO4A ... endif completely out of the po-docs
subdirectory, and just exclude the whole subdirectory if the po4a
program is not available.
This removes all support for building the ordinary / old
style appliance using febootstrap 2.x, debootstrap, debirf,
fakeroot and fakechroot.
Instead this uses febootstrap 3.x to build the supermin appliance
in a simpler cross-distro manner.
I have diffed the output from the original virt-df with this
new version, and they agree very closely. Some differences:
- Old virt-df have a divide-by-zero error in cases where the
number of used inodes was 0. New virt-df fixes this.
- New virt-df uses gnulib human_readable library which displays
numbers to 3 significant figures for -h output (old version
used an ad hoc function).
This tool replaces virt-list-filesystems and virt-list-partitions with
a new tool written in C with a more uniform command line structure
and output.
This existing Perl tools are deprecated but remain indefinitely.
With changes in the core API since 1.5, virt-cat was little
more than a Perl wrapper which did some command line argument
processing. Thus it could easily be rewritten in C.
This version also shares core command line argument processing
with guestfish and guestmount, so the options have changed
slightly (old-style command line *is* supported).
virt-cat -a disk.img file [file ...]
virt-cat -d domname file [file ...]
Several other guestfish options are supported including encryption,
and with the new style multiple files can be downloaded. See the
man page for details.
C# bindings were omitted entirely. Add a Makefile.am for this
directory even though we don't build these.
Because of a missing backslash, some POD files were not being
included.
The guestfish-only commands such as 'alloc' and 'edit' are
now generated from one place in the generator instead of being
spread around ad-hoc in the C code.
'src/generator.ml' is no more. Instead the generator is logically
split up over many different source files.
Read generator/README for help and tips.
We compile the generator down to bytecode, not native code. This
means it will run more slowly, but is done for maximum portability.
Note that these are not complete on 32 bit architectures. PHP doesn't
offer any convenient 64 bit type (on 32 bit). Therefore you should
always use these PHP bindings on 64 bit.
