I'm pleased also to announce the release of guestfs-tools 1.56.
Guestfs tools are a set of utilities for manipulating disk images,
virtual machine disks and similar files. This is a roll up release
from about a year of upstream work. Thanks in particular to Cole
Robinson for fixing a ton of bugs in this release and fixing our
upstream CI.
Note you will need to update to libguestfs 1.60 first.
Release notes attached below, or you can read them online here:
https://libguestfs.org/guestfs-tools-release-notes-1.56.1.html
Tarballs from:
https://download.libguestfs.org/guestfs-tools/1.56-stable/
Rich.
Guestfs tools 1.56.0 was released on 9 July 2026.
virt-builder
Fix building of "debian-13" template (pulsarrush).
Use HTTPS to fetch templates (Xiang Hua Chen).
virt-customize
Fix SELinux relabelling of "split /usr" guests.
Fix Windows Update and "pnputil /e" command in Windows guests after vir‐
tio-win drivers are injected (Cole Robinson).
When injecting virtio-win drivers in Windows guests, install blnsvr.exe
(the balloon server) (Cole Robinson).
Fix installation of Windows Vista and Windows 2008 Server R1 drivers (Cole
Robinson).
Remove the RHEL subscription-manager feature (Cole Robinson).
In firstboot scripts, print Windows "%USERNAME%" and
"%USERDOMAIN%" which
can be used to diagnose failures caused by insufficient permissions (Ming
Xie).
Windows firstboot scripts may now exit with code 250, meaning that no re‐
boot is required after the script. The next script in sequence runs imme‐
diately (Srihari Parimi).
On Windows, a sentinel file is created after all firstboot scripts have
run, which may be used to indicate that firstboot has completed.
virt-inspector
Add "<windows_group_policy/>" if Windows Group Policy was detected
inside
a guest.
New "<class>" element used to indicate the category of applications,
such
as antivirus.
For XFS filesystems, new "<type version="4|5">" to indicate
XFSv4 or
XFSv5. (This is also displayed in virt-filesystems(1) output.)
Add support for Kylin, NeoKylin and Anolis Linux (grass lu).
virt-sysprep
Add a new operation to clean zsh history files (Fazle Arefin).
Common changes
Some bash completion scripts that were no longer used by guestfs-tools
were removed. Also new "./configure --with-bash-completion" and
"./con‐
figure --with-bash-completion-dir" options were added (Christopher Byrne).
All tools taking a LUKS key file now allow a binary file to be used.
Documentation
Use qemu option -cpu max in documentation about running virt-builder
guests.
All information related to firstboot scripts was moved to and consolidated
in "FIRSTBOOT" in virt-customize(1) (Srihari Parimi).
Removed a lot of obsolete documentation in the virt-sysprep(1) man page.
Build changes
Fix Weblate (i18n) web hooks (Rafael Fontenelle).
Fixes for OCaml 5.
Add github CI (Cole Robinson).
Remove "AM_GNU_GETTEXT" macro and replace it with simpler
"LIBINTL" checks
(Cole Robinson).
Build Bison-based parser with -Wno-yacc to reduce yacc compatibility warn‐
ings that we don't care about (Cole Robinson).
Various build warnings were cleaned up (Cole Robinson).
"CFLAGS" is now prepended to the default, allowing default flags to be
overridden. In addition -fPIC is added to the default flags (Cole Robin‐
son).
Many memory leaks identified by Claude Code were fixed (shivanayak).
Internals
OCaml quoted string literals ("{|..|}") are used throughout the code to
make it easier to include verbatim scripts, code, regexps etc.
The sources for virt-cat(1), virt-filesystems(1), virt-log(1), virt-ls(1)
and virt-tail(1) previously used a single source directory (cat/) for no
particular reason. These were moved to separate directories.
Bugs fixed
https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-100682
Installing drivers on firstboot sometimes fail with PnP service not
available [rhel-9.7]
https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-108174
selinux-relabel doesn't work across filesystem boundaries (because
setfiles doesn't) [rhel-9.7]
https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-125955
virt-inspector detect if AV/GPOs are present in a VM [guestfs tools]
https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-144074
Expose XFS version in virt-filesystems
https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-170706
Virt-customize firstboot scripts (on Windows) should be able to skip
reboots
https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-170708
Document that exit code 249 means we retry the firstboot script (Win‐
dows only)
https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-171896
virt-v2v failing with binary LUKS keys [guestfs-tools]
https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-94873
Need to update uri to https:// for conf file in /etc/virt-builder/re‐
pos.d [rhel-10.1]
SEE ALSO
http://libguestfs.org/
AUTHORS
Christopher Byrne
Cole Robinson
Fazle Arefin
Fco. Javier F. Serrador
pulsarrush
Rafael Fontenelle
Richard W.M. Jones
Srihari Parimi
Temuri Doghonadze
Yuri Chornoivan
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat
http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog:
http://rwmj.wordpress.com
nbdkit - Flexible, fast NBD server with plugins
https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/nbdkit