Re: [Libguestfs] [v2v PATCH 0/4] convert_linux: install the QEMU guest agent with a firstboot script

On Tue, Jun 07, 2022 at 01:39:53PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > OTOH ... my comment here: > > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2028764#c2 > > was about more social issues where we've not been able to put the > qemu-ga RPMs on the ISO, and firstboot seemed like the easiest way to > get around that. AFAIK there is no way for a host subscribed to (eg) > RHEL 9 channels to download RHEL 7/8 RPMs. Maybe even hard to grab > SUSE or Debian packages. Just to clarify this. Obviously virt-customize has an --install option which can install packages into Linux guests. This works because the network is available and the yum/apt/etc commands within the guests are able to connect out to the distro package repositories. Virt-v2v is however a bit special here. While we might simply use the exact same method as virt-customize (and the network is also enabled), we have historically preferred not to do operations which require network access. This is mainly for the benefit of Red Hat's downstream customers. They may run virt-v2v in an environment where there is no network, or the guest may not be subscribed to RHN without some manual intervention.

I wonder if we want to revisit this assumption? From an upstream point of view, using the network while virt-v2v is running to install qemu-ga from the distro repositories is fine (and considerably simpler). Even from a downstream point of view I guess it would work in most cases, and maybe installing qemu-ga is a "nice-to-have" so as long as it doesn't hard-fail the whole conversion, would that be sufficient? RH customers with isolated networks can install qemu-ga themselves using Ansible post-conversion scripts etc.