Re: [Libguestfs] virt-sysprep future
On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 10:02:11AM +0800, Wanlong Gao wrote:
Hi Rich,
> What's the plan for virt-sysprep?
>
> It's an interesting proof-of-concept.
>
> People love it!
>
> But it has several shortcomings. As I said before, I think it should
> be spun off into a separate project, and possibly be rewritten
> (/bin/bash is a terrible language for writing complicated things). It
> really needs to support at least some Windows guests to some degree.
>
> Any thoughts on this?
Yes, I also think it should be spun off into a separate project, and be
rewritten. But I want you doing the splitting work if you have time, and
then I can try to rewrite it and do further works.
Ha ha, but you know I'm going to rewrite it in OCaml :-)
And I considered trying to use NBD though it. NBD has already used in
qemu
named qemu-nbd, support all the virtual disk image, and the most important
thing is that it's much more faster than guestmount, because it doesn't need
to start a guest. But NBD client must be used under root, because it uses
/dev/nbdX, and need to install the kernel nbd module.
What do you think Rich?
With my RHEL hat on, NBD wouldn't be any use because we don't support
it, so we couldn't ship such a modified virt-sysprep in RHEL.
I'm not clear why NBD is useful though. nbd+kpartx is much more
limited than libguestfs. If guestmount is slow for you, let's work
out why it's slow and make it faster (it's not slow for _me_).
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any
software inside the virtual machine. Supports Linux and Windows.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/