[Libguestfs] Planned libguestfs versions in Fedora 12-15, EPEL 5

Fedora 15 (Rawhide): Development branch 1.5.x. As usual, this follows the current development versions (currently 1.5.5). Fedora 14: Development branch 1.5.x. When Fedora 14 branched from Rawhide a month back, we inadvertently branched at a development version (1.5.2). We couldn't go back to the stable branch (1.4.x) without bumping the RPM Epoch. In the meantime Fedora 14 got a new kernel (2.6.35) which has a massive performance regression with a particular qemu feature that we relied on. We had to do a lot of work last week to work around this in libguestfs. Since we've fixed this problem, I plan to just keep on the development branch for Fedora 14. By upgrading to >= 1.5.4 we work around the performance issue, and get many more people testing the development version into the bargain. Fedora 13: Stable branch 1.4.x + backports Fedora 13 + febootstrap 2.8 + libguestfs git is the sweet spot for performance right now. Because of the non-broken kernel plus the performance improvements we've made upstream, the appliance boot times are under 5 seconds. Therefore I intend F13 to stay on the stable 1.4.x branch, and backport some major features from 1.5.x: - inspection code in C (improves performance of guestfish -i) - ext2-based appliance (performance fix) - virtio-serial (faster daemon communications) and some minor features required by virt-v2v too. This is very much going to be a test for a possible RHEL 6.1 version. Fedora 12: Old stable branch 1.2.x. EPEL 5: Old stable branch 1.2.x. EPEL 5 is following the old stable 1.2.x branch, and I don't plan to change that, except to push more stable versions along this branch. 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/