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.