Re: [Libguestfs] GSoC project to deal with bootloaders
[Adding Ian McLeod]
On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 12:57:49AM +0530, Kashyap Chamarthy wrote:
Hi Matt,
I was discussing with Rich on #libguestfs about using the supermin
appliance to 'package' all the 3 outputs (kernel, initrd, root) the
fedora appliance [1] into a raw/qcow2 image.
[1] http://git.annexia.org/?p=a-fedora-appliance.git;a=summary
He then suggested, it's not easy,but do-able:
- put the kernel and initrd onto the root disk, and then install a
bootloader;
- and then installing 'syslinux' on disk images
And said it'd be a nice GSoC project to deal with bootloaders.
If you have time to mentor, you might want to add some details under
qemu/libvirt GSoC umbrella -
http://wiki.qemu.org/Google_Summer_of_Code_2013
I think there's a GSoC project in here. I'm envisaging something like
this:
(1) Extend libguestfs to add support for detecting which bootloader is
installed on a disk.
This would be a part of inspection. eg. You'd point it at a disk, it
would examine the boot sector and other sectors and filesystem, and
say "grub2" or "NTLDR" (or whatever).
It would also produce some other information such as which [operating
systems? partitions? OS versions?] this boot loader is responsible for
booting.
This would be immediately useful for virt-v2v.
(2) Extend libguestfs to allow certain bootloaders to be installed.
We have, controversially, a grub-install API. It was deliberately
broken by the upstream grub / Fedora maintainers because they didn't
want to maintain grub-legacy any longer. I *still* think it's a good
idea to allow boot loaders to be installed from libguestfs. It looks
like we could install: SYSLINUX, for sure. Grub{1,2} with a lot more
effort. NTLDR: not at all because of licensing issues.
Ian McLeod could use this immediately for his SYSLINUX / OpenStack
work.
(3) Extend libguestfs to allow a bootloader to be copied from one
guest to another.
virt-resize could use this. The way it does it right now is
hokey voodoo (although it does tend to work, a lot of time).
https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/resize/resize.ml#L854
- - -
In fact, looking at this, I don't think we can wait for GSoC :-)
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
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