I'm trying to install libguestfs on Debian squeeze installed from http://people.debian.org/~bengen/libguestfs/
It does not work. Here are the details:


I was able to install libguestfs-tools and its dependencies. However, aptitude removed the following two packages: qemu and qemu-system. I'm not sure if it's okay or not. If I try to install those packages back, I get the following:

# aptitude install qemu qemu-system
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  qemu qemu-system{b}
0 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 16.6 MB of archives. After unpacking 50.9 MB will be used.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  qemu-system: Depends: openbios-ppc (>= 1.0+svn1018) but 1.0+svn640-1 is installed.
               Depends: openbios-sparc (>= 1.0+svn1018) but 1.0+svn640-1 is installed.

My first question is, is this normal? Do I need the qemu and qemu-system packages installed? What about these openbios dependencies?


The next problem I have encountered: When I installed libguestfs-tools, aptitude also installed the cryptsetup ( cryptsetup/squeeze uptodate 2:1.1.3-4squeeze2 ) package as a dependency. Since then, every time I run update-initramfs, I get this:

# update-initramfs -u
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-5-amd64
cryptsetup: WARNING: failed to detect canonical device of /dev/md1
cryptsetup: WARNING: could not determine root device from /etc/fstab

I use RAID1 arrays md1 and md3 on my system. I googled "cryptsetup: WARNING: failed to detect canonical device" and "cryptsetup: WARNING: could not determine root device" to no avail. I mean, some other people get these warnings too, but I haven't find any solution to get rid of these warning messages. Since these are just warnings, I guess I can just ignore these?


Now, back to the main issue: libguestfs does not work! When I run libguestfs-test-tool, it stops with the following error:

Failed to connect to virtio-serial channel.

This is a fatal error and the appliance will now exit.

Usually this error is caused by either QEMU or the appliance
kernel not supporting the vmchannel method that the
libguestfs library chose to use.  Please run
'libguestfs-test-tool' and provide the complete, unedited
output to the libguestfs developers, either in a bug report
or on the libguestfs redhat com mailing list.


When I try to use the virt-filesystems tool, after about 2-3 seconds it stops with an error message that says:

# virt-filesystems -a myimagefile.img
libguestfs: error: guestfs_launch failed, see earlier error messages

Then in the log files I see these:

libvirtd: 04:49:11.561: warning : qemudStartup:1832 : Unable to create cgroup for driver: No such device or address
libvirtd: 04:49:11.729: warning : lxcStartup:1900 : Unable to create cgroup for driver: No such device or address

Basically, none of the libguestfs tools work on my Debian squeeze system... What can I do to make libguestfs install properly?


I thought that maybe I should install a newer Linux kernel from backports? Currently I use the following squeeze kernel:
linux-image-2.6.32-5-amd64/squeeze uptodate 2.6.32-45

Do I need to install 3.x kernel for libguestfs ?

BTW, the following packages are installed from the squeeze-backports (or Bengen's) repository on my system:

febootstrap/squeeze uptodate 3.14-2~bpo60+1
ipxe/squeeze uptodate 1.0.0+git-2.149b50-1~bpo60+1
kvm/squeeze uptodate 1:0.14.1+dfsg-4~bpo60+1
libguestfs0/squeeze uptodate 1:1.16.17-1~bpo60+1
libguestfs-perl/squeeze uptodate 1:1.16.17-1~bpo60+1
libguestfs-tools/squeeze uptodate 1:1.16.17-1~bpo60+1
qemu-keymaps/squeeze uptodate 0.14.1+dfsg-3~bpo60+1
qemu-kvm/squeeze uptodate 0.14.1+dfsg-4~bpo60+1
qemu-user/squeeze uptodate 0.14.1+dfsg-3~bpo60+1
qemu-utils/squeeze uptodate 0.14.1+dfsg-3~bpo60+1
seabios/squeeze uptodate 1.6.3-2~bpo60+1
vgabios/squeeze uptodate 0.7a-1~bpo60+1

Do I miss something?

I would really appreciate if someone can point me to the right direction! Thanks!

Zoltan