[Libguestfs] [ANNOUNCE] libguestfs 1.6.0 tools for accessing and modifying VM disk images

libguestfs is tools and a library for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images. Home page: http://libguestfs.org/ Source: http://libguestfs.org/download/ I'm pleased to announce the latest stable release of libguestfs 1.6.0 which is available immediately from the website and through Fedora. This represents an enormous amount of work over the last 4-5 months and wouldn't have been possible without help and feedback from many testers. Thanks also to Matt Booth for patches and making virt-v2v great. Here are the release notes (also at http://libguestfs.org/RELEASE-NOTES.txt ) Release notes for libguestfs 1.6.0 ---------------------------------- New features - Use a new method for creating and caching the appliance. This greatly improves the performance of libguestfs, often by a factor of x 4 to x 5. - Support for guest inspection (like virt-inspector) via the ordinary API and all language bindings. 'guestfish -i' option is as a side- effect much quicker. - virt-inspector and core inspection API can now detect guests running: Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Scientific Linux, Gentoo, Pardus, Arch Linux, MeeGo. - Support for LUKS whole-disk encryption in guests. - PHP bindings. - Progress messages (and progress bars in guestfish and virt-resize) for certain long-running operations. - virt-df is now much more efficient. Use '--one-per-guest' to restore the old per-guest isolation behaviour. - guestfish 'copy-in' and 'copy-out' commands for copying files and directories recursively in and out of the guest. - guestfish 'hexedit' command for doing binary edits to devices and files. - Change guestfish -i syntax to allow commands to be specified on the command line (retaining backwards compatibility). - guestfish '-d <domain>' for adding disks from libvirt domains. - guestfish '-N' option supports several new prepared disk image types: lvfs : disk with LV formatted with filesystem lv : disk with LV bootroot : boot+root bootrootlv : boot and root on LV - guestfish 'more' and 'edit' commands now work with arbitrary files. - guestfish '--echo-keys' option allows you to echo keys/passphrases while typing them. - guestmount now supports -a / -d / -i options, like guestfish. - Use virtio-serial for communications with the appliance. This also has a major performance benefit. - virt-edit '-b' option to create a backup of edited files. - virt-edit '-e' option for non-interactive edits to files. - Ability to capture core dumps from the appliance (thanks Matthew Booth). - virt-rescue now shuts down cleanly (thanks Matthew Booth). - virt-rescue now has a --network option to enable network access. - virt-resize can now handle guests which use GPT partition table format. - virt-resize has better support for shrinking guests. - virt-resize supports qcow2-format guests. - $TMPDIR can be used to override almost all temporary directory usage. - OCaml users can use an alternate OO-style of coding, eg. g#launch () - The API supports calls which take optional parameters, eg. $g->add_drive_opts ("disk", readonly => 1); - Trace output now escapes and shortens large strings (thanks Matthew Booth). - Autosync is now on by default, resulting in more reliable behaviour when the handle is closed. - virt-df --uuid option allows you to follow a domain across migration and renaming. - Translations of manual pages. Security - CVE-2010-3851 libguestfs: missing disk format specifier when adding a disk https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2010-October/msg00036.html This is comprehensively fixed in this release, and the fix will be backported to the other stable branches after more testing. - virt-inspector no longer relies on untrusted guest code to list applications in some guests. New APIs download-offset, file-architecture, findfs-label, findfs-uuid, inspect-os, inspect-get-arch, inspect-get-distro, inspect-get-filesystems, inspect-get-major-version, inspect-get-minor-version, inspect-get-mountpoints, inspect-get-product-name, inspect-get-type, is-blockdev, is-chardev, is-fifo, is-lv, is-socket, is-symlink, list-filesystems, luks-add-key, luks-close, luks-format, luks-format-cipher, luks-kill-slot, luks-open, luks-open-ro, lvm-clear-filter, lvm-canonical-lv-name, lvm-set-filter, part-to-dev, pread-device, pwrite-device, upload-offset Internals - Use size_t for loop iterators. - Refactor the library code into separate files. - Refactor the generator code into separate files. - Generate guestfish commands. - guestfish & guestmount options processing is unified. - Protocol changes: error message size increased to 64K send errno to library - Add 'make bindist' to make a binary distribution. - Cleaner behaviour under valgrind. - More testing of the guestfish command line options and libvirt integration. - The Perl inspection code is no longer used by any of the tools. Bugs fixed - 646822 libguestfs trace mode should not print long binary strings - 646821 virt-df should have --uuid option - 646432 /dev/mapper paths should not be returned from guestfs_mountpoints - 643624 libguestfs tools documentation should describe how to quote guest domain names from shell - 642934 No way to specify disk format when adding a disk to libguestfs - 642933 guestfs_list_filesystems should be used in all possible places - 642932 guestmount options should match guestfish options - 642930 virt-inspector (Sys::Guestfs::Lib) should use C inspection APIs - 642929 C inspection code should ignore /dev/fd* in /etc/fstab - 642826 virt-resize converts any other image format to raw without notifying user, instructions do not account for this - 640961 Document that grub-install might be needed for old Linux guests after virt-resize - 639986 virt-df --csv does not properly quote " in libvirt domain names - 639405 Interrupted cached appliance creation leaves libguestfs unusable - 638901 Appliance filename should not contain repository name - 638899 /dev/mapper paths should not be returned from C inspection APIs - 636918 Updates to Spanish translation - 636061 [abrt] guestfish-1.2.11-1.fc12: malloc_consolidate: Process /usr/bin/guestfish was killed by signal 11 (SIGSEGV) - 635969 glob echo mkfs ext2 /dev/vd[b-t]1 prints garbage - 634246 guestfs_part_get_parttype returns "loop" when run against a partition, LV or filesystem - 633766 virt-resize --shrink fails - 633357 Updates to Spanish translation - 633096 virt-resize calculates block device size incorrectly, doesn't work with qcow2 target - 629593 Dutch translation added - 627556 Updates to Spanish translations of libguestfs - 626843 Updates to Spanish translations - 619793 [RFE] Need a way to determine if a particular block device is a logical volume - 618556 virt-rescue return none zero value when exit - 617200 mount operation failed and hung on some images which running in read-only mode - 610880 libguestfs should set broader read perms on tmpdir, so works in some situations when executed with umask 077 - 599503 document that mkmountpoint and umount-all cannot be mixed - 571714 Running virt-df on disk image relabels it, so qemu can no longer write to it. - 502533 Updated Polish translation of libguestfs -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com Fedora now supports 80 OCaml packages (the OPEN alternative to F#) http://cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_red_hat_and_fedora