[Libguestfs] libguestfs 1.18.4 & 1.16.27 released (was: NOTICE: Data corruption bug)

On Wed, Jul 04, 2012 at 05:28:05PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: I've just pushed libguestfs stable releases 1.18.4 and 1.16.27 to the website: http://libguestfs.org/download/1.16-stable/ http://libguestfs.org/download/1.18-stable/ Upgrading is recommended, but read the rest of this email first. Usually a stable point-release is supposed to be a simple, safe update that will only fix bugs, because of our policy[1] of only cherry- picking simple bug fixes. [1] http://libguestfs.org/guestfs.3.html#libguestfs_version_numbers However in this case I have to urge some caution. These releases contain a fix for the qemu data corruption bug[2], but if your qemu still has this bug then the new libguestfs will loudly report when qemu crashes (instead of ignoring it). This means that virt programs that worked before, and the test suite, may fail where before they ran successfully. [2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=836710 I thought this was better than ignoring potential data corruption. The solution to this is to use qemu >= 1.1.0. Furthermore, and again highly unusual for a point release, these versions contain backports of three new APIs: The first is guestfs_shutdown[3] which can be used from your program to detect write/finalization failures linked to the qemu bug. It is not necessary, but it's recommended, to use this API from your programs, as described here[4] and in the updated examples. [3] http://libguestfs.org/guestfs.3.html#guestfs_shutdown [4] http://libguestfs.org/guestfs.3.html#guestfs_close The other two[5][6] are there because of a bugfix[7] to the inspection code which I felt was important to include in the stable branches. [5] http://libguestfs.org/guestfs.3.html#guestfs_device_index [6] http://libguestfs.org/guestfs.3.html#guestfs_nr_devices [7] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=627675 If there are any problems, please file bugs in the usual place. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting, bindings from many languages. http://libguestfs.org