[Adding Ian McLeod] On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 12:57:49AM +0530, Kashyap Chamarthy wrote: I think there's a GSoC project in here. I'm envisaging something like this: (1) Extend libguestfs to add support for detecting which bootloader is installed on a disk. This would be a part of inspection. eg. You'd point it at a disk, it would examine the boot sector and other sectors and filesystem, and say "grub2" or "NTLDR" (or whatever). It would also produce some other information such as which [operating systems? partitions? OS versions?] this boot loader is responsible for booting. This would be immediately useful for virt-v2v. (2) Extend libguestfs to allow certain bootloaders to be installed. We have, controversially, a grub-install API. It was deliberately broken by the upstream grub / Fedora maintainers because they didn't want to maintain grub-legacy any longer. I *still* think it's a good idea to allow boot loaders to be installed from libguestfs. It looks like we could install: SYSLINUX, for sure. Grub{1,2} with a lot more effort. NTLDR: not at all because of licensing issues. Ian McLeod could use this immediately for his SYSLINUX / OpenStack work. (3) Extend libguestfs to allow a bootloader to be copied from one guest to another. virt-resize could use this. The way it does it right now is hokey voodoo (although it does tend to work, a lot of time). https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/resize/resize.ml#L854 - - - In fact, looking at this, I don't think we can wait for GSoC :-) Rich. -- 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#)