[Libguestfs] ANNOUNCE: libguestfs 1.56 & virt-v2v 2.8 releases

I'm pleased to announce the stable releases of libguestfs (1.56) and virt-v2v (2.8). Libguestfs is a library for reading and writing virtual machines and disk images. Virt-v2v is program for converting virtual machines from foreign hypervisors to run on qemu/KVM. These were last released over a year ago. There are some major new features and many fixes, especially in virt-v2v. Thanks to the many people who contributed to these. Their names and the new features are covered in the release notes below. Please note this version of libguestfs proposes to deprecate GObject (ie. Javascript) bindings, with their eventual removal scheduled for 1.58. Downloads: https://download.libguestfs.org/1.56-stable/ https://download.libguestfs.org/virt-v2v/2.8-stable/ Fedora packages are available in Fedora 41, 42 testing; and Fedora Rawhide. These versions will also be available in RHEL 10.1 later in the year. Release notes are below or online at: https://libguestfs.org/guestfs-release-notes-1.56.1.html https://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v-release-notes-2.8.1.html RELEASE NOTES FOR LIBGUESTFS 1.56 These are the release notes for libguestfs stable release 1.56. This describes the major changes since 1.54. Libguestfs 1.56.0 was released on 11th June 2025. Inspection Add support for Windows 2025 (thanks Ming Xie). Add support for TencentOS (Denise Cheng). Inspection of Ubuntu 22+ guests that use a split /usr configuration now works properly (thanks Jaroslav Spanko, Daniel Berrange). Inspecting guests that have duplicated root mountpoints now works. Inspection of SUSE Linux guests using btrfs snapshots now ignores snapshots that mirror content in the root filesystem (thanks Ming Xie). Inspection of SUSE Linux >= 15 now returns the correct osinfo short name (eg. "sle15") (thanks Ming Xie). API New "command_out" and "sh_out" APIs which allow you to capture output from guest commands that generate more output than the protocol limit allows. New "btrfs_scrub_full" API which runs a full Btrfs scrub, synchronously. It works more like fsck for other filesystems. The "fstrim" API has been modified to work around several issues in upstream and RHEL 9 kernels related to XFS support (Eric Sandeen, Dave Chinner). The existing "e2fsck" API has a new "FORCENO" option enabling use of the command line -n flag. Language bindings Previously "-L../lib/.libs" got embedded in the distributed OCaml bindings. This has been fixed. GObject bindings have been deprecated and will be removed in libguestfs 1.58. Build changes json-c is now required. This replaces Jansson which was previously used for parsing JSON input files. OCaml ≥ 4.08 is now required. OCaml oUnit is no longer used. We now assume that "__attribute__((cleanup))" always works. This requires gcc or Clang. Fix compatibility with file(1) ≥ 5.46. Fix compatibility with Fedora ≥ 42 which merges /usr/sbin into /usr/bin. Fix compatibility with latest Rust compiler (Jacob Reger). lex(1), yacc(1) and libmagic (part of file(1)) have not been required by libguestfs for a long time, but were still checked by the ./configure script. This has been fixed, they are no longer build dependencies (thanks Mohamed Akram). When using "./configure --disable-daemon" we no longer require augeas and hivex (thanks Mohamed Akram). "zfs-fuse" support has been dropped. The project is unmaintained upstream (thanks Paul Bolle, Gwyn Ciesla, Timothée Ravier). Fix compatibility with GNU gettext 0.25. Internals The tests were modified to use a set of common functions and remove use of the weird $TEST_FUNCTIONS macro, similar to how we do it in nbdkit. Fix dhcpcd failing on systemd-resolved stub (Thomas Wouters). Add support for dhcpcd and sfdisk on Debian (Daniel Gomez). Print the kernel utsname in debug output. The legacy "pvs_full", "vgs_full" and "lvs_full" APIs were completely rewritten in OCaml. Some deprecated autoconf macros are no longer used. We no longer emit a false warning about "BLKDISCARD" when creating a block device. Some internal OCaml List and String functions that we used have been replaced by ones from the OCaml stdlib, reducing code maintenance. If qemu-img(1) commands fail during snapshot creation, make sure we capture and print stderr from the qemu command (Cole Robinson). Bugs fixed https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-62935 [rhel 9.6] windows version of win2025 guest shows incorrect during v2v conversion https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-80159 Add new APIs to allow command output > 4MB https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-87493 The Ubuntu 22.04 VM from VMware fails with Inspection field ‘i_arch’ was ‘unknown’ [rhel-9.7] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-88450 fstrim on a RHEL 7.2-created XFS filesystem does not trim as much as expected https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-88508 Run fstrim twice to work around incorrect fstrim behaviour in RHEL 9 kernel https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-90168 virt-v2v fails with mount exited with status 32: mount: /sysroot: /dev/sda2 already mounted on /sysroot. [rhel-9.7] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-92239 Lost error when opening wrong format of image readonly [rhel-10.1] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-93109 RFE: Investigate & do something useful with btrfsvol:...snapshots in SUSE Linux guests https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-95791 libguestfs generates the wrong osinfo for SLES 15 guests [rhel-9.6] https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/issues/155 1.54.0: gdisk/test-expand-gpt.pl fails https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/issues/162 New test suite failure in c-api with file-5.46 https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/issues/167 Weblate | erroneous source strings https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/issues/182 sed: RE error: illegal byte sequence in build https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/issues/183 bash-completion fails to install on macOS https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/issues/184 augeas, hivex and libmagic required even when daemon is disabled https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/issues/191 Failing to build ocaml/examples SEE ALSO guestfs-examples(1), guestfs-faq(1), guestfs-performance(1), guestfs-recipes(1), guestfs-testing(1), guestfs(3), guestfish(1), http://libguestfs.org/ AUTHORS Cole Robinson Daniel Gomez Denise Cheng Ettore Atalan Jacob Reger Krascovict Petrov Léane GRASSER Richard W.M. Jones Ricky Tigg Thomas Wouters Yuri Chornoivan RELEASE NOTES FOR VIRT-V2V 2.8 These are the release notes for virt-v2v 2.8. This describes the major changes since 2.6. Virt-v2v 2.8.0 was released on 11th June 2025. New features New virt-v2v-open(1) tool. This can be used to open the virt-v2v source and run a user program on it. For example virt-inspector(1) or guestfish(1) can be used to examine the source to discover what operating systems or files are present before conversion. Windows Server 2025 is supported (thanks Ming Xie). Two features have been added to enhance data integrity. Firstly you can specify a "<checksum>" field for each input disk (when importing from libvirt). Virt-v2v will verify the checksum of the actual disk matches the expected checksum. Secondly virt-v2v in debug mode now computes the blkhash (a type of checksum) of the converted disk and prints it out, allowing you to compare the blkhash with the final output. The UEFI secureboot property is now modelled correctly, and (for outputs which support it) is reflected in the output metadata (thanks Daniel Berrange, Andrea Bolognani, Ming Xie). Parallel disk copies are now possible, using the --parallel=N option. The default behaviour is still to do serial copies. virt-v2v-in-place(1) has a new -O option. This generates the same output as virt-v2v-inspector(1), allowing callers to combine both passes into one. Virtio-win driver selection has been made more robust. It now selects the correct drivers to install in more cases, and avoids installing unnecessary debugging and SRIOV files. Libosinfo is no longer used for this as the osinfo metadata used had grown out of date. (Cole Robinson) We now check filesystem integrity (using tools like fsck(8)) before and after conversion, to ensure both that we fully understand the filesystem before conversion and that no corruption has happened during conversion. At the moment this is only implemented for Btrfs, ext4 and XFS. Features removed Handling of kmod-xenpv has been removed. This only applied to RHEL 3 and RHEL 4 guests being converted from very ancient versions of Xen (Cole Robinson). Some options that have been deprecated since 2018 and earlier were removed: --compressed Use -oo compressed instead. --no-trim This did nothing. --password-file Use --ip instead. --qemu-boot Use -oo qemu-boot instead. --vddk-* Use --io vddk-* instead. --vdsm-* Use --oo vdsm-* instead. --vmtype This did nothing. The options -o rhv-upload and -o rhv have been renamed to -o ovirt-upload and -o ovirt respectively, although aliases for the other names remain. Other fixes Update support page to cover RHEL 10 and Windows Server 2025. When importing from libvirt sources, trim whitespace from around the "<name>" element, rather than creating a guest name containing that whitespace. We no longer overwrite the EFI grub2 wrapper file (/boot/efi/EFI/<OS>/grub.cfg) on Fedora ≥ 34 and RHEL ≥ 9.0. When removing packages during conversion, use yum, apt, and similar tools so that dependencies are also removed (Cole Robinson). When some rpm commands run in the context of the guest produced more than 4MB of output, virt-v2v conversions would fail. This has now been fixed (thanks Nijin Ashok). Virt-v2v is now compatible with guests that use dnf5. -i vmx mode now supports importing guests with SATA-emulated disks. Converting from a VMware snapshot is now possible, when using VDDK, using the io vddk-file=... options (thanks Martin Necas). Conversion failures when guest /etc/resolv.conf is immutable are common enough that we have now documented this problem in the manual (thanks Dan Clark). Debug information now contains much more readable information about guest mountpoints, similar to the output of virt-df(1). -o libvirt mode no longer generates its own osinfo short IDs. Instead we use the osinfo short IDs from libguestfs inspection (Cole Robinson). Document how to activate Bitlocker for Windows 11 with vTPM (thanks Ming Xie). Build changes json-c is now required. This replaces Jansson which was previously used for parsing JSON input files. libguestfs ≥ 1.56 is now required. OCaml ≥ 4.08 is now required. libnbd ≥ 1.14 is now required. nbdkit ≥ 1.28 is now required, although it is better to use more recent versions where possible. OCaml oUnit is no longer used. We now assume that "__attribute__((cleanup))" always works. This requires gcc or Clang. The configure option --with-virt-v2v-nbdkit-python-plugin has been removed. It was only needed for very old versions of nbdkit and Python. Tests should no longer break if ntfs-3g is not supported by libguestfs. Fix compatibility with GNU gettext 0.25. Internals The tests were modified to use a set of common functions and remove use of the weird $TEST_FUNCTIONS macro, similar to how we do it in nbdkit. The way we generate the phony virtio-win drivers (for testing) has been simplified. Also there are new regression tests to ensure that virt-v2v installs the correct set of driver files. (Cole Robinson). Phony Windows guests are now generated for several different versions of Windows, allowing more broad testing (Cole Robinson). Some deprecated autoconf macros are no longer used. nbdkit-cacheextents-filter(1) is no longer used, as it did not help performance now that we have switched to using nbdcopy(1) (thanks Martin Kletzander). With multi-disk guests, in some common cases we are now able to use a single nbdkit(1) instance to read or write all disks, instead of needing to run an nbdkit instance per disk, which can greatly reduce the number of external processes that virt-v2v will run. The performance and results should not be different. To take full advantage of this you have to use nbdkit ≥ 1.44. Several typos and spelling mistakes in the documentation were fixed (thanks Eric Blake). Duplicated code used to parse input (-i) and output (-o) options across the tools has been refactored in one place. Some internal OCaml List and String functions that we used have been replaced by ones from the OCaml stdlib, reducing code maintenance. Bugs fixed https://issues.redhat.com/browse/MTV-2256 Document issues with upgrading Windows guests after conversion https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-32099 Harden grub2-mkconfig to avoid overwriting /boot/efi/EFI/redhat/grub.cfg https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-39077 v2v can't convert the guest if info "add_dracutmodules+=" network-legacy " is added to network-legacy.conf [rhel-9.6] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-58032 v2v: add output file after virt-v2v-in-place conversion [rhel-9.6] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-65009 Can't find drivers from virtio-win for win2025 guests during v2v conversion [rhel 10.0] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-65010 Can't find drivers from virtio-win for win2025 guests during v2v conversion [rhel 9.6] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-66197 [MTV] migration failed with module "network-legacy" configured in RHEL 8 guests https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-67007 [RFE] Add secureboot info in kubevirt output [rhel-9.7] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-67836 RFE: Get the uefi.secureBoot.enabled setting from VMware sources [rhel-9.6] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-71522 Migration Plan / vddk pod cannot remove open-vm-tools in case of dependencies [rhel-9.6] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-77989 CentOS 9 Migration from VMWare to Openshift Virt fails [rhel-9.6] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-80080 Converting a SUSE VM will fail if the kernel-source package is installed in the source VM https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-85508 Improve checksumming and data consistency checks in virt-v2v, libnbd, nbdkit https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-85512 Print blkhash of converted image in virt-v2v debugging output [9.7] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-85514 Print blkhash of converted image in virt-v2v debugging output [10.1] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-86022 There is no nbdcopy info in v2v debug log since virt-v2v version 2.7.1-2 [rhel-9.7] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-88543 virt-v2v-inspector is failing on snapshots of running VMs [rhel-9.7] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-88985 Add possible roots to the virt-v2v-inspector output [rhel-9.7] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-70840 v2v can't convert win11-efi-secure guest with vtpm: "Activation of partially decrypted BITLK device is not supported" [rhel-9.6] https://github.com/libguestfs/virt-v2v/issues/79 virt-v2v 2.7.4 error: libguestfs error: you must call guestfs_add_drive before guestfs_launch https://github.com/libguestfs/virt-v2v/issues/86 Rename RHV to oVirt SEE ALSO virt-v2v(1). AUTHORS Authors of virt-v2v 2.8: Cole Robinson Krascovict Petrov Richard W.M. Jones Ricky Tigg Yuri Chornoivan -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com virt-builder quickly builds VMs from scratch http://libguestfs.org/virt-builder.1.html