libguestfs/docs/guestfs-release-notes-1.36.pod

=head1 NAME

guestfs-release-notes - libguestfs Release Notes

=head1 RELEASE NOTES FOR LIBGUESTFS 1.36

These release notes only cover the differences from the previous
stable/dev branch split (1.34.0).  For detailed changelogs, please see
the git repository, or the ChangeLog file distributed in the tarball.

=head2 New features

=head3 New tools

Virt-tail is a new tool for following (tailing) log files within a
guest, similar to the regular C<tail -f> command.

=head3 New features in existing tools

Virt-customize, virt-get-kernel, virt-sparsify and virt-sysprep can
now handle encrypted guests (Pino Toscano).

Virt-builder and virt-customize now support I<--append-line>, which is
useful for adding lines to the end of configuration files.

Virt-resize can now shrink and expand swap partitions (Pino Toscano).

Virt-resize can now output to non-local disks (Pino Toscano).

Virt-sysprep has a new operation called C<backup-files> for removing
editor backups, and C<passwd-backups> for removing F</etc/passwd-> and
similar.

Virt-dib can now create checksums using the new I<--checksum> option
(Pino Toscano).

Virt-dib can now create tgz files.  In addition, extended attributes
and SELinux labels are preserved in the output tar file (Pino
Toscano).

Virt-dib can now create squashfs files (Pino Toscano).

Bash tab-completion is now available in every command line tool that
is shipped.

=head3 virt-v2v and virt-p2v

Conversions of Debian (6+) and Ubuntu (10.04+) guests are now
supported (Tomáš Golembiovský, Pino Toscano).

Conversions from SUSE Xen hypervisor have now been tested
(Cédric Bosdonnat).

Windows conversions may now install a program C<pnp_wait.exe> which
prevents conflicts between the Windows Plug-and-Play Manager and our
own scripts that install virtio device drivers.  Enabling this
requires the C<pnp_wait.exe> program to be built separately
(Roman Kagan).

OVA files exported from AWS can now be converted (Shahar Havivi).

When converting OVA files, in some circumstances virt-v2v can now read
disk images directly from the OVA input file instead of needing to
unpack the OVA file to a temporary directory.  This can save large
amounts of disk space, and is quicker (Tomáš Golembiovský).

Virt-p2v can now be built on RHEL 5 (2007-era) Linux and RHEL 6, which
means that 32 bit and hardware with ancient fakeraid disks can be
virtualized.  Binaries of virt-p2v based on these old versions of
RHEL can be found at http://oirase.annexia.org/virt-p2v/

Virt-p2v can now use nbdkit (an NBD server) as an alternative to
qemu-nbd.  In addition, virt-p2v can use "socket activation" which is
a more robust method for opening the NBD listening socket.  Socket
activation works with qemu-nbd or nbdkit, but requires the most up to
date versions.

To prevent timeouts during P2V conversions, virt-p2v inhibits power
saving on the physical machine, and also sends ping packets over the
ssh control and data connections.

Virt-v2v no longer removes the C<Processor> and C<Intelppm> nodes from
the Windows Registry.

Xen and vCenter conversions can now be done using the libvirt backend,
provided libvirt E<ge> 2.1.0 is used.

F</dev/srX> (SCSI CD-ROM) devices are ignored (Tomáš Golembiovský).

When converting SUSE Linux guests, use F</etc/modprobe.conf.local> if
it exists.

Removing VMware tools from Linux guests should now work reliably
(Pino Toscano).

When converting OVA files, virt-v2v now checks the disk image hash
contained in the manifest file, whereas previously it was ignored
because of a mistake in the code.  In addition, SHA256 hashes are now
supported (Tomáš Golembiovský).

When converting OVA files that contain compressed disk images, we now
trust the C<ovf:compression> attribute from the metadata instead of
using content sniffing on the disk image (Tomáš Golembiovský).

A new flag I<--vdsm-compat> has been added to I<-o vdsm> mode,
allowing more efficient qcow2 images to be generated.

Since the RHEV product [commercially supported version of oVirt] has
now been renamed to RHV, "RHEV" was changed to "RHV" throughout the
tooling.  In particular, I<-o rhev> becomes I<-o rhv>, although the
old name can be used for backwards compatibility.

The C<RHEV-APT> utility is only installed when the output hypervisor
is oVirt or RHV.

A problem with virt-v2v running out of memory when doing an SELinux
relabel of the guest filesystem should now be resolved.

=head3 Language bindings

Setting C<EXTRA_JAVAC_FLAGS> before F<./configure> allows you to
add arbitrary flags to C<javac> when compiling the Java bindings.

Use of any libguestfs API which returned a single struct, from Perl or
Java bindings, would have leaked memory.  This has now been fixed
(Pino Toscano).

=head3 Inspection

Inspection of Windows guests with mildly corrupted Windows Registry
hives should now work instead of failing with an error.  This feature
requires hivex E<ge> 1.3.14 (Dawid Zamirski).

For Debian guests, we can now read the URL, source name, summary and
full description of installed packages.  For RPM-based guests we can
read the URL, summary and description (Pino Toscano).

Inspection of guest operating systems that use a separate F</usr>
partition should now work more reliably (Pino Toscano).

When parsing guest F</etc/fstab>, paths are reduced to a canonical
form (eg. C<"///usr//local//"> → C<"/usr/local">).

Inspection of btrfs subvolumes now works where the F</etc/fstab>
options field contains commas.

F</dev/cdN> devices in guest F</etc/fstab> are ignored (Pino Toscano).

=head3 Architectures and platforms

Stable releases are now tested on aarch64, ppc64 and ppc64le
architectures.

The RISC-V architecture is now handled as a guest, and libguestfs will
now at least compile on RISC-V (but probably not work as there is no
usable qemu at the time of writing).

Detection of S/390 and S/390x binaries and guests is now supported.

=head3 Other

ExFAT filesystems are now supported (Miles Wolbe).

=head2 Security

See also L<guestfs-security(1)>.

There were no CVEs reported in this development cycle.  However some
security-related hardening was carried out as described below.

Temporary filenames are now always generated using randomness from
F</dev/urandom> (previously the C function L<random(3)> was used in
one case).

The C<$TERM> environment variable is now validated before passing it
through to the appliance kernel command line.

=head2 API

=head3 New APIs

=over 4

=item C<guestfs_aug_transform>

Exposes the Augeas C<aug_transform> API (Pino Toscano).

=item C<guestfs_find_inode>

Find files by inode number (Matteo Cafasso).

=item C<guestfs_inspect_get_windows_software_hive>

=item C<guestfs_inspect_get_windows_system_hive>

Return the path to the Windows C<HKLM\SYSTEM> and C<HKLM\SOFTWARE>
hives computed during inspection.

=item C<guestfs_mksquashfs>

Create a squashfs filesystem from a path (Pino Toscano).

=back

=head3 Other API changes

=over 4

=item C<guestfs_add_domain>

This call now handles libvirt file-based volumes correctly, where
previously these would have been ignored.  Also handled are disks
which require libvirt authentication secrets to open (Pino Toscano).

=item C<guestfs_canonical_device_name>

This call will no longer incorrectly modify Linux software RAID device
names (like F</dev/mdX>).

=item C<guestfs_file_architecture>

Previously the C<file_architecture> API could return either of the
strings C<i386> or C<i486> for 32 bit x86 binaries.  It now only
returns C<i386> (as documented).

This API can now return the following new values: C<riscv32>,
C<riscv64>, C<riscv128>, C<s390>, C<s390x>.

=item C<guestfs_hivex_open>

This now has an optional C<GUESTFS_HIVEX_OPEN_UNSAFE> flag which
allows certain corrupted Windows Registry hives to be opened.  This
feature requires hivex E<ge> 1.3.14 (Dawid Zamirski).

=item C<guestfs_list_partitions>

This call now returns Linux software RAID partitions.

=item C<guestfs_part_to_dev>

This call now correctly handles partition names which include
C<pE<lt>NE<gt>> (Pino Toscano).

=item C<guestfs_set_label>

This call can now change the labels of swap partitions (Pino Toscano).

=back

=head2 Build changes

libmagic, the library part of the C<file> command, is now required at
build time (previously optional).

GCC 7 is now supported.

"Silent rules" are now used for OCaml programs, Java bindings.  To
show the full command line executed, add C<V=1> on the make command
line (Pino Toscano).

Slow testing (C<make check-slow>) now covers: firstboot scripts in
Linux guests; v2v conversion of a selection of real Linux guests; the
virt-customize I<--hostname> and I<--timezone> settings; the
I<--root-password> parameter; that the serial console works in
virt-builder guests.

Large generated C source files, eg. the list of commands found in
F<fish/cmds.c> (and many more), have been split into smaller files to
speed parallel compilation.

C<make maintainer-check-extra-dist> now checks that all generated
files are included in the tarball.

The tests no longer assume that C<.> is in Perl's C<@INC>, as it is
going to be removed soon (Pino Toscano).

Debian hosts using UsrMerge are now supported (Pino Toscano).

Header files and C structs can now have internal documentation using
the special C</** ... */> comments.

C<@VAR@> subtitutions in C<./run> are now fully quoted.  This is
necessary so that (eg) C<./configure PYTHON=/some/path> works robustly
if C</some/path> contains characters that need to be quoted (Hilko
Bengen).

gperf E<ge> 3.1 is now supported.

Kraxel's old edk2 builds can no longer be used for UEFI support.  UEFI
code is now fully free software, so use the versions bundled with your
Linux distro instead.

Virt-p2v can now be compiled on RHEL 5 (2007-era) Linux with Gtk 2.10.

=head2 Internals

The generator and mllib C<Common_utils> modules are now shared from
the same source file.

A considerable amount of common code has been moved into the F<common>
directory in the source and is now compiled only once.  The
mini-libraries located under here are: F<common/edit>,
F<common/errnostring>, F<common/miniexpect>, F<common/options>,
F<common/parallel>, F<common/progress>, F<common/protocol>,
F<common/utils>, F<common/visit>, F<common/windows>.

The directory containing the main library code has moved from F<src> →
F<lib>.

All tests written in shell script now use a common file of utility
functions (F<tests/test-functions.sh>).  There are several new utility
functions, mainly for skipping tests.  Also these test scripts can now
use autoconf-like path variables like C<$abs_top_srcdir>.

UEFI paths are now stored in the generator (F<generator/uefi.ml>).

The way the generator handles actions and procedure numbers was
changed quite substantially.  See F<generator/actions_*.ml> and
F<generator/proc_nr.ml>.

The gnulib C<getprogname> module is now used everywhere when
needing/printing the program name (Pino Toscano).

F<perl/Guestfs.c> is not translatable (Nikos Skalkotos).

Virt-builder templates moved from F<builder/website> to
F<builder/templates> and there is now a single unified program which
can build any template.

All Windows registry utilities used by virt-customize and virt-v2v
have been moved to a common module called C<Registry> under F<mllib>.

All POSIX bindings have been moved to a new module called
C<Unix_utils> under F<mllib>.

Inspection, virt-customize and virt-v2v no longer recompute the
Windows C<%systemroot%>, C<CurrentControlSet> or paths to the
C<HKLM\SYSTEM> and C<HKLM\SOFTWARE> hives in multiple places.  Instead
these are all computed once (during inspection) and passed to the
other tools through various C<guestfs_inspect_get_windows_*> APIs.

C</dev/pts> is now available inside the appliance, so any tools we run
which require a pty will now work (Pino Toscano).

Most OCaml warnings have been fixed.

There is now a single common function for creating temporary
files (C<guestfs_int_make_temp_path>) (Matteo Cafasso).

The C<$TERM> environment variable is now validated before passing it
through to the appliance kernel command line.

Useless USB and memballoon devices are no longer created in the
appliance (Laine Stump).

On aarch64 we now use virtio-pci for the appliance.  This is somewhat
faster than virtio-mmio.

Use of L<srandom(3)> and L<random(3)> has been minimized.  In
particular, temporary filenames are no longer created based on
randomness returned by L<random(3)>, but F</dev/urandom> is used
instead.

=head2 Bugs fixed

=begin comment

https_proxy= ./bugs-in-changelog.sh v1.34.0..

=end comment

=over 4

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1425306>

typo error in virt-tail man page

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1418283>

virt-v2v: appliance runs out of memory running setfiles command

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1417549>

/usr/bin/x86_64-linux-gnu-ld.bfd.real: ../common/progress/.libs/libprogress.a(libprogress_la-progress.o): undefined reference to symbol 'UP@@NCURSES_TINFO_5.0.19991023'

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1417444>

*** No rule to make target '../perl/lib/Sys/Guestfs.c', needed by 'libguestfs.pot'

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1416941>

compile of 1.34.3 fails with gperf 3.1

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1414682>

guestfs_canonical_device_name incorrectly returns /dev/sd0 for MD devices (/dev/md0)

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1414510>

guestfs_list_filesystems does not recognize ddf partitions

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1409023>

[Debian] ldmtool not installed in the appliance

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1404287>

qemu-kvm cannot boot RHEL 7 kernel with TCG, hangs at "Probing EDD (edd=off to disable)..."

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1404182>

RFE: virt-resize should support a URL as the outdisk

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1401474>

Importing VMs from VMware is failing with error "Inspection field 'i_arch' was 'unknown'"

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1401320>

RFE: Increate virt-sysprep coverage a bit

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1400205>

Add --vdsm-compat=1.1 flag for VDSM

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1398070>

typo error in man page

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1392798>

secrets from libvirt domains are not read

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1390876>

"--machine-readable" info should be updated in virt-v2v manual page

=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/1377081>

virt-p2v manual should update the new dialog information

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1375157>

virt-v2v: -i ova: Permission denied when using libvirt and running as root

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1374651>

Can't install qxl driver for display device in win7 guest after converting to glance by virt-v2v

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1374405>

There is HTTP 404 error info when convert guest to glance by virt-v2v

=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/1372668>

Process status is not normal in windows guest after converted from kvm to rhev by virt-v2v

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1372269>

Builder does not set hostname properly for Debian 8 (Jessie)

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1371843>

Improve OVA import compatibility

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1370424>

virt-manager coredump when vm with gluster image exists

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1367839>

Cannot import VMs from Xen and VMware when using RHEL7.3 host.

=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/1367615>

OVMF file which is built for rhel7.3  can't be used for virt-v2v uefi conversion

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1366456>

Converting rhel7 host installed on RAID:warning: fstrim: fstrim: /sysroot/: the discard operation is not supported

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1366049>

RFE: libvirt backend: support handling disks stored as volume name in a pool

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1365005>

Guest name is incorrect if convert guest from disk image by virt-v2v

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

RFE: virt-sysprep does not utilize libguestfs encryption support

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1354507>

virt-v2v conversions from vCenter do not consistently obey the proxy environment variables

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1168144>

warning: fstrim: fstrim: /sysroot/: FITRIM ioctl failed: Operation not supported (ignored) when convert win2003 guest from xen server

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1161019>

RFE: Only install RHEV-APT if virt-v2v -o rhev/-o vdsm option is used

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1152369>

virt-v2v failed to convert RHEL 6.7 UEFI guest: no grub1/grub-legacy or grub2 configuration file was found

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1141631>

[RFE] virt-v2v should support convert a guest to a dir-pool with using pool's uuid

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1134878>

libvirt reports json "backing file" is missing

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1019388>

firstboot scripts (virt-builder, virt-sysprep) don't work for Debian 6 & 7 guests

=item L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/737600>

virt-v2v windows xp - machine dies BSOD - processr,sys - workaround provided

=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.