[Libguestfs] ANNOUNCE: libguestfs 1.20 - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images

I'm very pleased to announce the release of libguestfs 1.20. Libguestfs is a library and a comprehensive set of tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine (VM) disk images. For more information see http://libguestfs.org Libguestfs 1.20 represents 7 months of upstream work, dozens of major new features and bug fixes. For full details read the release notes below. You can download the libguestfs source from http://libguestfs.org/download/1.20-stable and packages will soon be available for Fedora 18 and Debian Wheezy. For additional notes on Fedora 18, see: https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2012-December/msg00047.html For additional notes on Debian Wheezy, see: https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2012-December/msg00046.html ---------------------------------------- You can also read the release notes online at: http://libguestfs.org/guestfs-release-notes.1.html RELEASE NOTES FOR LIBGUESTFS 1.20 New features libvirt and sVirt (SELinux confinement) You can optionally use libvirt to launch and manage the backend appliance by: * setting LIBGUESTFS_ATTACH_METHOD=libvirt[:URI] * using ./configure --with-default-attach-method=libvirt[:URI] * or calling the API method guestfs_set_attach_method SVirt (SELinux confinement) is used to secure the libguestfs appliance, if the libvirt backend is selected. virtio-scsi, larger number of drives, hotplugging Virtio-scsi is now used by default, if it is available. This greatly increases the number of drives that can be added to a single libguestfs handle (up to 255). You can now hotplug drives (add and remove drives after launch). Libguestfs can now handle > 25 disks, in all APIs, tools and tests. You can label drives when adding them, then refer to them by label (/dev/disk/guestfs/LABEL) instead of having to use device names (/dev/sda). new library features POSIX Access Control Lists (ACLs) and Linux filesystem capabilities can now be read and written through the API. Windows Dynamic Disks are now supported. The metadata can only be read (volumes cannot be modified or created). However the data/filesystems in the volumes themselves can be mounted, read and written (Matthew Booth). Hivex (Windows Registry editing) is now directly supported through the API, making reading or editing the Windows Registry much more efficient. Several libguestfs APIs were reimplemented so they no longer have any limits on output. The reimplemented APIs are: guestfs_cat, guestfs_find, guestfs_read_file, guestfs_read_lines, guestfs_write, guestfs_write_append, guestfs_lstatlist, guestfs_lxattrlist, guestfs_readlinklist, guestfs_ls. virt tools guestfish touch 'win:c:\new_file' now works as expected. guestfish has a new --network option, which enables the user network in libguestfs. You can set GUESTFISH_PS1 to use fancy prompts in guestfish. rsync, ssh, less and lrzip commands are now available in virt-rescue. In addition, rsync can be used through the API for doing incremental copies. virt-sparsify uses qcow2 v3 for increased efficiency. virt-sysprep enhancements: * generate new UUIDs for PVs and VGs * remove the local machine ID (Wanlong Gao) * remove ABRT data (Wanlong Gao) * remove puppet keys and log files (Wanlong Gao) * remove process accounting files (Wanlong Gao) * new --firstboot parameter allowing firstboot scripts for customizing guests * remove HOSTNAME field from ifcfg-eth* files (Wanlong Gao) * miscellaneous improvements for SuSE (Olaf Hering) * remove man pages cache (Wanlong Gao) * remove crash data generated by kexec-tools (Wanlong Gao) virt-make-fs can now create virtual floppy disks (VFDs). guestmount has a --pid-file option, which can be used to avoid a race condition between unmounting the filesystem and using the underlying disk image. language bindings Full-featured Lua bindings have been added in this release (thanks to Jerome Vuarand for many suggestions). In Ruby, optional arguments hash is optional. In Python, optional arguments now don't use special "sentinel" values, so any integer can be passed as an optional argument. Erlang bindings now come with examples and tests. Erlang bindings now handle 64 bit integer parameters correctly. The automated 'bindtests' now test for 64 bit cleanliness in parameter passing. Several bugs in the bindings were found and fixed as a result. Better handling of blocking and non-blocking functions should make libguestfs calls more efficient. inspection Windows guests with unlimited-sized Registries are now supported. By adding the hivex API to the libguestfs API, it is much more efficient and easier to inspect and modify the Windows Registry in guests. Better support for SuSE guests (Olaf Hering). Return the architecture of installed applications (John Eckersberg). Windows 8 is now supported. Fedora 18 is now supported. Inspection of ISOs/CDs/DVDs can now use the libosinfo database. ports Libguestfs without the appliance can be compiled on Mac OS X (Masami HIRATA). RHEL 5 is now explicitly supported through the 'oldlinux' branch in upstream git. PowerPC 64 bit is now supported. Also libguestfs has been examined for endianness bugs and these have been fixed. daemon A man page for the daemon (guestfsd(8)) is included. Security guestfish history file The $HOME/.guestfish history file is now created with 0600 permissions (instead of 0644 before) so it is no longer world readable. CVE-2012-2690 Old versions of both virt-edit and the guestfish edit command created a new file containing the changes but did not set the permissions, etc of the new file to match the old one. The result of this was that if you edited a security sensitive file such as /etc/shadow then it would be left world-readable after the edit. This issue was assigned CVE-2012-2690, and is fixed in libguestfs ≥ 1.16. For further information, see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=788642 New APIs acl-delete-def-file acl-get-file acl-set-file canonical-device-name cap-get-file cap-set-file create-flags device-index disk-has-backing-file disk-format disk-virtual-size filesystem-available fill-dir fstrim get-cachedir get-libvirt-requested-credentials get-libvirt-requested-credential-prompt get-libvirt-requested-credential-challenge get-libvirt-requested-credential-defresult get-tmpdir hivex-close hivex-commit hivex-node-add-child hivex-node-children hivex-node-delete-child hivex-node-get-child hivex-node-get-value hivex-node-name hivex-node-parent hivex-node-set-value hivex-node-values hivex-open hivex-root hivex-value-key hivex-value-type hivex-value-utf8 hivex-value-value inspect-list-applications2 (John Eckersberg) list-ldm-volumes list-ldm-partitions ldmtool-create-all ldmtool-diskgroup-disks ldmtool-diskgroup-name ldmtool-diskgroup-volumes ldmtool-remove-all ldmtool-scan ldmtool-scan-devices ldmtool-volume-hint ldmtool-volume-partitions ldmtool-volume-type ls0 max-disks mke2fs (Wanlong Gao) mklost-and-found mkswap [added label and uuid optional arguments] mktemp (Wanlong Gao) nr-devices parse-environment parse-environment-list rm-f rsync rsync-in rsync-out set-cachedir set-libvirt-supported-credentials set-libvirt-requested-credential set-tmpdir shutdown [backported to 1.16 and 1.18] tar-in [added compress flag] tar-out [added compress, numericowner, excludes flags] umount [added force and lazy optional arguments] utsname xfs-admin (Wanlong Gao) xfs-growfs (Wanlong Gao) xfs-info (Wanlong Gao) xfs-repair (Wanlong Gao) In the C API only: guestfs_push_error_handler guestfs_pop_error_handler Internals qemu ≥ 1.1 is required (≥ 1.2 preferred). febootstrap ≥ 3.20 is required. libvirt is optional, but if you want to use the new libvirt backend for launching the appliance then libvirt ≥ 0.10.2 would be required. Coverity has been run over the complete codebase, and many issues fixed (thanks Ondrej Vasik, Kamil Dudka). Functions which previously had no optargs can now be converted to ones with optargs, making extending the API much more flexible. Source and binary backwards compatibility is preserved for users of the API. The way that libguestfs APIs and structures are represented in the generator has changed to use an OCaml struct instead of a tuple. This makes generator descriptions more flexible and easier to understand. For details see commits 39d1a7db and eb185eef. Separation of the library code into more files: * Launch backends are now located in separate files eg. src/launch-appliance.c, src/launch-libvirt.c. * Generated action code is now split over several src/action*.c files, for faster compilation. * The huge src/guestfs.c file is now split into smaller logical units. POD (documentation) is now generated using a rewritten Perl program instead of pod2* + shell scripts. Man pages now contain stable dates (Hilko Bengen). Skipped tests now exit with code 77, so they appear as SKIP: in make check output. The parallel mount-local test has been rewritten in C (RHBZ#838081). Ruby 1.8.5 is now supported (though Ruby ≥ 1.9 is preferred). Perl bindings can be disabled via ./configure --disable-perl (Wulf C. Krueger). Note that Perl is still required in order to build libguestfs. Java bindings are now enabled/disabled using ./configure --with-java or ./configure --without-java (Wulf C. Krueger). New configure options ./configure --enable-code-profiling and ./configure --enable-code-coverage. Multiple fixes to use of 64 bit integers in language bindings. The appliance backend now uses sgabios instead of vgabios (Dan Berrange). The ./run script now sets enough environment variables that you can run OCaml, Python, Ruby, Java, GJS, Erlang, Lua programs. ./run --test flag for running tests with minimal output. It also prints the time taken to run each test. The ./run script now builds up paths cumulatively, meaning that you can use ./run twice, or use the libguestfs and libvirt ./run scripts together. You can extract a list of external commands required by the daemon, making building the appliance on certain distros easier (Olaf Hering). The virt-rescue command is now tested during make check. The generator now removes unused generated files. This helps when going back and forth with git rebase, git bisect, etc. Tests now run in a separate toplevel tmp/ directory in the source. This allows the directory to be labelled for SELinux (sVirt), and also makes it easier to clean up. make syntax-check now works to a greater extent, and many problems in the main code that were found by syntax-check have been fixed (thanks Jim Meyering). Emacs mode (-*- foo -*-) has been added to generated files. Progress bar output is now sent to /dev/tty so it doesn't end up in the regular output of the program. virt-resize and virt-sparsify now suppress progress bars if stdout is not a tty. There is now a ./configure --without-libvirt option. This is useful for testing that the code still compiles without libvirt. There is now an internal mini-library for running commands. This allows us to redirect errors from external commands into events. Code for handling temporary directories and the appliance cache was completely overhauled. Code for temporarily ignoring/disabling errors now looks like this: guestfs_push_error_handler (g, NULL, NULL); guestfs_mkdir (g, "/foo"); /* We don't care if this fails. */ guestfs_pop_error_handler (g); The tests/extra directory has gone. The "extra tests" are now split into separately runnable targets, such as make check-valgrind. Use make help to get a summary of the targets. The lpj option is passed to the appliance kernel when using TCG. This should improve clock stability (thanks Marcelo Tosatti, Olaf Hering). Bugs fixed https://bugzilla.redhat.com/882417 libguestfs tools fail with odd error messages if TMPDIR is not an absolute path https://bugzilla.redhat.com/882299 Windows 8 guest disks can't be mounted: "The NTFS partition is in an unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation or fast restarting), or mount the volume read-only with the 'ro' mount option." https://bugzilla.redhat.com/881953 libguestfs: migration to /etc/hostname, /etc/vconsole.conf, /etc/locale.conf https://bugzilla.redhat.com/880801 virt-df with two -a options displays incorrect disk image name https://bugzilla.redhat.com/879416 libguestfs-test-tool pauses when you use --help option https://bugzilla.redhat.com/876579 mke2fs API does not apply block device naming translation to journaldevice optarg https://bugzilla.redhat.com/860235 SELinux policy ought to allow qemu to write to unconfined_u:object_r:user_tmp_t:s0 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/859949 RFE: inspect-list-applications does not return the architecture of RPM packages https://bugzilla.redhat.com/859885 inspect-list-applications does not list all installed RPM packages with same name and different versions https://bugzilla.redhat.com/859876 guestfish printed paths are not canonicalized https://bugzilla.redhat.com/859875 Progress bar output should go to tty(?) stderr(?) https://bugzilla.redhat.com/858696 virt-sysprep reports Guestfs.Error("read_lines: fopen: /etc/sysconfig/network: No such file or directory") on some Fedora guests https://bugzilla.redhat.com/858128 libguestfs fail to list devices added by add-drive-ro-with-if twice https://bugzilla.redhat.com/858126 virt-inspector fail to work with some windows guests https://bugzilla.redhat.com/853762 virt-sparsify should use a more robust method to detect the input format https://bugzilla.redhat.com/853393 libvirt doesn't label console, serial sockets https://bugzilla.redhat.com/853159 virt-rescue in Fedora 18 is completely broken https://bugzilla.redhat.com/852394 libguestfs inspection limits registries to 100 MiB https://bugzilla.redhat.com/852194 virt-sparsify --compress fails if output is raw format https://bugzilla.redhat.com/847881 RFE: allow extra arguments (like --exclude) to tar-out https://bugzilla.redhat.com/847880 tar-out should allow (or force) --numeric-owner https://bugzilla.redhat.com/845522 guestfish "copy-out / localdir" command fails with "No such file or directory" https://bugzilla.redhat.com/845488 Long filenames on NTFS cause tar-out, copy-out etc to fail with error "Cannot open: File name too long" https://bugzilla.redhat.com/842307 RFE: Need help designing and implementing selinux policy for libguestfs/sVirt https://bugzilla.redhat.com/840572 virt-make-fs / tar-in should support vfat properly https://bugzilla.redhat.com/840115 guestfish touch problem - case_sensitive_path API expects the file to exist https://bugzilla.redhat.com/836710 Data loss when writing to qcow2-format disk files https://bugzilla.redhat.com/834712 lvresize, lvresize-free fail unnecessarily if you don't change the size of the LV: "New size (nn extents) matches existing size (nn extents)" https://bugzilla.redhat.com/824716 compress-device-out didn't support bzip2 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/824043 guestfish unrecognized mount option gives confusing error message https://bugzilla.redhat.com/823887 Filenames containing Chinese characters can't be created on vfat filesystems https://bugzilla.redhat.com/823885 virt-make-fs cannot create vfat filesystem containing filesystems with chinese characters https://bugzilla.redhat.com/823883 virt-make-fs -t fat fails with an obscure error message https://bugzilla.redhat.com/823821 Inspection fails when /etc/HOSTNAME is empty https://bugzilla.redhat.com/801117 libguestfs cannot get icon for Windows 8 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/798979 Ubuntu install CDs from oneiric onwards are not recognized: "multi-boot operating systems are not supported" https://bugzilla.redhat.com/782167 libguestfs doesn't recognize Windows Dynamic disks in some configurations, eg. spanned https://bugzilla.redhat.com/713678 Not all febootstrap messages are redirected to log callbacks https://bugzilla.redhat.com/627675 libguestfs inspector code cannot handle /dev/disk/by-id/* paths https://bugzilla.redhat.com/602997 part-get-bootable gives wrong result with an unordered part layout ---------------------------------------- Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting, bindings from many languages. http://libguestfs.org