This was a feature that allowed you to add drives to the appliance
after launching it. It was complicated to implement, and only worked
for the libvirt backend (not "direct", which is the default backend).
It also turned out to be a bad idea. The original concept was that
appliance creation was slow, so to examine multiple guests you should
launch the handle once then hot-add the disks from each guest in turn
to manipulate them. However this is terrible from a security point of
view, especially for multi-tenant, because the drives from one guest
might compromise the appliance and thus the filesystems/drives from
subsequent guests.
It also turns out that hotplugging is very slow. Nowadays appliance
creation should be faster than hotplugging.
The main use case for this was virt-df, but virt-df no longer uses it
after we discovered the problems outlined above.
User-Mode Linux was an alternative hypervisor that could run the
appliance, instead of using qemu. It had many limitations including
lack of network, and UML support in Linux has been semi-broken for a
long time. It was also slower than KVM on baremeal in general and had
various corner cases which were much slower including the emulated
serial port which made bulk uploads and downloads painful. Also of
course it lacked qemu-specific features like qcow2 or any
network-backed disk, so many disk images could not be opened this way.
This was never supported in RHEL.
See-also: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1144197
This experimental feature allowed you (in theory) to connect to an
existing instance of the libguestfs daemon. (Again, in theory) it
allowed you to attach to running guests. This didn't work well in
practice. If you want to do this, install qemu-guest-agent inside
your guest instead.
This also disables the --live options in guestfish and guestmount.
(The option now prints an error).
This was never supported in RHEL.
The daemon tests relied on this connection method to perform tests on
a bare daemon, so this removes those tests. They were not especially
valuable.
See-also: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/798980
Commit e9eaf4d889 ("docs: Split release notes by release.") split the
old guestfs-release-notes(1) page by release, but left now-broken
links to guestfs-release-notes(1) in various places in the
documentation.
The easiest way to fix this is to recreate this page by renaming
guestfs-release-notes-historical(1) as guestfs-release-notes(1) and
adding links to the other release notes pages.
Fixes: commit e9eaf4d889
Commit e597fc5317 ("daemon/yara: fix undefined behavior due to Yara 4.0
API changes", 2021-10-12) prevents the daemon from using such a Yara
version that precedes 4.0.0.
If only yara < 4 is found, treat the library as absent, rather than
attempting and failing to compile the yara module of the daemon. Note the
version requirement in the documentation too.
Suggested-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Suggested-by: Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Laszlo Ersek <lersek@redhat.com>
Message-Id: <20211013133611.21599-4-lersek@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@redhat.com>
As part of our efforts to clean up and simplify libguestfs, removing
gnulib deletes a large dependency that we mostly no longer use and
causes problems for new users trying to build the library from source.
A few modules from gnulib are still used (under a compatible license)
and these are copied into gnulib/lib/
Currently the guestfs_isoinfo and guestfs_isoinfo_device APIs run
isoinfo inside the appliance to extract the information.
isoinfo is part of genisoimage which is somewhat dead upstream.
xorriso is supposedly the new thing. (For a summary of the situation
see: https://wiki.debian.org/genisoimage).
This commit rewrites the parsing from C to OCaml to make it easier to
deal with, and allows you to use either isoinfo or xorriso.
Mostly the same fields are available from either tool, but xorriso is
a bit more awkward to parse.
This Debian page explains the upstream situation:
https://wiki.debian.org/genisoimage
On Fedora, xorriso provides a compatibility program called "mkisofs".
However this is not present in Debian. Hence the choice to look for
the program called "xorrisofs".
This is used in virt-win-reg, but that tool have moved out to
guestfs-tools so the dependency is no longer needed by libguestfs
itself.
Fixes: commit 733d2182b6
This was only used for a single rule (check-valgrind-local-guests)
which ran "make check-valgrind" on local guests. This was never
really used by me and was fairly inadvisable anyway, so we can easily
remove it and thus remove the dependency on perl Sys::Virt.
This brings libguestfs into line with other projects which have a
separate include/ directory for the public header.
It's also the case that <guestfs.h> has never particularly belonged in
the lib/ subdirectory. Some tools add -Ilib/ but they only need
<guestfs.h> and not any other headers from that directory, and
separating out the public header allows us to clean those up. This is
certainly the case for examples, and some language bindings and some
tests.
In future I'm hopeful we can use this as the basis to tease out other
dependencies, as a prelude to separating them out from the repo.
Python 2 reached end of life on 2020-01-01:
https://python3statement.org/https://pythonclock.org/
The minimum version required is now Python 3.4 (since that is the
version in Debian oldoldstable), but 3.6 is the minimum version that
I actually test.
Replace the use of liberl_interface, which is removed in Erlang 23,
by libei. The implementation uses the ei_decode_iodata() function
which has been introduces only for Erlang 23, so it doesnt work with
earlier Erlang versions.
Appliance device names are not reliable since the kernel no longer
enumerates virtio-scsi devices serially. Instead get the UUID of the
appliance and pass this as the parameter.
Note this requires supermin >= 5.1.18 (from around July 2017).
On current Fedora releases the ocaml modules will fail to
link unless CFLAGS contains -fPIC.
The autogen.sh script only updates the 'gnulib' submodule,
and so the build will fail due to the missing 'common'
submodule. This needs to be manually initialized at checkout.
Signed-off-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com>
Invoke make-internal-documentation.pl by its path in the source
directory.
Also, depend on it to regenerate the documentation in case
make-internal-documentation.pl changes.
After the proposed split of the libguestfs repo, we will end up with
the following layout:
libguestfs.git
common -> git submodule libguestfs-common.git
generator
virt-v2v.git
common -> git submodule libguestfs-common.git
guestfs-tools.git
common -> git submodule libguestfs-common.git
The generator will only be able to write to libguestfs directories and
the common directory/submodule. This is mostly the case already with
only 6 exceptions:
customize/customize-options.pod
customize/customize-synopsis.pod
customize/customize_cmdline.ml
customize/customize_cmdline.mli
v2v/uefi.ml
v2v/uefi.mli
This commit moves these files around so they appear under common/ml*
It is somewhat unsatisfactory because it involves copying files
around, but there are some mitigating factors:
(1) Any changes now give us more freedom to develop faster and thus
clean things up in future.
(2) The v2v/uefi files ought to go away in future anyway.
This is simple code motion and should have no effect on the built
programs or tests.
