Slackware support for libguestfs (was: Re: ocaml-augeas 0.7 source tarball)
by Richard W.M. Jones
On Sat, Jul 26, 2025 at 01:36:38PM +0200, 414N wrote:
> Il 08/07/25 09:41, Richard W.M. Jones ha scritto:
> >Different problem. I can upload a new appliance here, but is there a
> >reason not to just generate the appliance? The binary appliance is
> >only really intended for very specialized uses.
> >
> >Rich.
>
> I have some updates on the matter: I'm almost there with adding
> Slackware support to both supermin and libguestfs.
> During my tests I was finally able to have virt-v2v-inspector
> successfully bring up a custom-built appliance against the .ova file
> that I wanted to convert to a libvirt appliance, but then I
> discovered that virt-v2v currently does not support Alpine Linux
> images (I'm also working on it).
Alpine is going to be a tricky one to support in virt-v2v. Our usual
policy is to avoid converting "appliance"-style Linux distros, on the
basis that the kinds of modifications that virt-v2v makes are neither
necessary nor (sometimes) possible on these types of distros. In
pithy terms, virt-v2v is for pets, not cattle.
Are you sure that your Alpine applications can't simply be recreated
(eg. from Ansible playbooks or however you deploy software) on the
target?
> Where can I post the aforementioned Slackware-support patches when I
> feel confident about them? On the mailing list?
You can either use 'git-email' to email them to
guestfs(a)lists.libguestfs.org (no subscription is required), or you can
post them as pull requests to the relevant upstream project(s) on
https://github.com/libguestfs
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting,
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1 week, 6 days
Re: GuestFish intermittently failing after upgrading Base image to Fedora 40
by Richard W.M. Jones
On Fri, Jul 11, 2025 at 10:41:59PM +0000, Chintan Patel wrote:
> Hi Richard,
>
> We were using LibguestFS version 1.52 on Fedora 39 and it was working as
> expected since last year, but due to the security issue and Fedora 39 is our of
> support we need to upgrade to Fedora 40 for our container base image.
>
> But after upgrading to Fedora 40, we are started experiencing intermittent
> failure on guestfish to mount the disk, sometime it is able to mount the disk
> as well execute the copy command to copy the files from disk and fails in
> middle. We are getting below failure messages in the failure.
>
>
> message
> OperationalLog: /dev/sda2: ntfs [uuid=30BC6B21BC6AE0B8]
> /dev/sda3: vfat [uuid=166A-F60E]
> /dev/sda4: ntfs [uuid=9E3C6B453C6B1793]
> GuestFish:Inspecting OS Metadata:Remote> /libguestfs/run guestfish --remote
> inspect-os
> GuestFish:Inspecting OS Metadata:Error>
> guestfish: protocol error: could not decode reply from server
> GuestFish: Retrying forInspecting OS Metadata
> GuestFish:Inspecting OS Metadata:Remote> /libguestfs/run guestfish --remote
> inspect-os
> GuestFish:Inspecting OS Metadata:Error>
> guestfish: remote: looks like the server is not running
>
>
>
> message
> GuestFish:Mount [/,/dev/sda1]:Remote> /libguestfs/run guestfish --remote --
> -mount-ro /dev/sda1 /
> GuestFish:Mount [/,/dev/sda1]:Error>
> guestfish: remote: looks like the server is not running
>
>
>
> I tried upgrading the libguesfs to the latest version 1.56.1 but still
> observing similar errors intermittently.
The error comes from
https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/dc218b25f0bc2704918748e4e81...
But there's not a lot else to go on. The protocol used:
https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/fish/rc_protocol.x
is very simple and hasn't changed in many years, so I don't know why
the XDR function would fail like this.
If you can get a proper, reliable reproducer, then I guess file a bug.
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
virt-builder quickly builds VMs from scratch
http://libguestfs.org/virt-builder.1.html
1 month
