I'm pleased also to announce the release of guestfs-tools 1.56. Guestfs tools are a set of utilities for manipulating disk images, virtual machine disks and similar files. This is a roll up release from about a year of upstream work. Thanks in particular to Cole Robinson for fixing a ton of bugs in this release and fixing our upstream CI. Note you will need to update to libguestfs 1.60 first. Release notes attached below, or you can read them online here: https://libguestfs.org/guestfs-tools-release-notes-1.56.1.html Tarballs from: https://download.libguestfs.org/guestfs-tools/1.56-stable/ Rich. Guestfs tools 1.56.0 was released on 9 July 2026. virt-builder Fix building of "debian-13" template (pulsarrush). Use HTTPS to fetch templates (Xiang Hua Chen). virt-customize Fix SELinux relabelling of "split /usr" guests. Fix Windows Update and "pnputil /e" command in Windows guests after vir‐ tio-win drivers are injected (Cole Robinson). When injecting virtio-win drivers in Windows guests, install blnsvr.exe (the balloon server) (Cole Robinson). Fix installation of Windows Vista and Windows 2008 Server R1 drivers (Cole Robinson). Remove the RHEL subscription-manager feature (Cole Robinson). In firstboot scripts, print Windows "%USERNAME%" and "%USERDOMAIN%" which can be used to diagnose failures caused by insufficient permissions (Ming Xie). Windows firstboot scripts may now exit with code 250, meaning that no re‐ boot is required after the script. The next script in sequence runs imme‐ diately (Srihari Parimi). On Windows, a sentinel file is created after all firstboot scripts have run, which may be used to indicate that firstboot has completed. virt-inspector Add "<windows_group_policy/>" if Windows Group Policy was detected inside a guest. New "<class>" element used to indicate the category of applications, such as antivirus. For XFS filesystems, new "<type version="4|5">" to indicate XFSv4 or XFSv5. (This is also displayed in virt-filesystems(1) output.) Add support for Kylin, NeoKylin and Anolis Linux (grass lu). virt-sysprep Add a new operation to clean zsh history files (Fazle Arefin). Common changes Some bash completion scripts that were no longer used by guestfs-tools were removed. Also new "./configure --with-bash-completion" and "./con‐ figure --with-bash-completion-dir" options were added (Christopher Byrne). All tools taking a LUKS key file now allow a binary file to be used. Documentation Use qemu option -cpu max in documentation about running virt-builder guests. All information related to firstboot scripts was moved to and consolidated in "FIRSTBOOT" in virt-customize(1) (Srihari Parimi). Removed a lot of obsolete documentation in the virt-sysprep(1) man page. Build changes Fix Weblate (i18n) web hooks (Rafael Fontenelle). Fixes for OCaml 5. Add github CI (Cole Robinson). Remove "AM_GNU_GETTEXT" macro and replace it with simpler "LIBINTL" checks (Cole Robinson). Build Bison-based parser with -Wno-yacc to reduce yacc compatibility warn‐ ings that we don't care about (Cole Robinson). Various build warnings were cleaned up (Cole Robinson). "CFLAGS" is now prepended to the default, allowing default flags to be overridden. In addition -fPIC is added to the default flags (Cole Robin‐ son). Many memory leaks identified by Claude Code were fixed (shivanayak). Internals OCaml quoted string literals ("{|..|}") are used throughout the code to make it easier to include verbatim scripts, code, regexps etc. The sources for virt-cat(1), virt-filesystems(1), virt-log(1), virt-ls(1) and virt-tail(1) previously used a single source directory (cat/) for no particular reason. These were moved to separate directories. Bugs fixed https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-100682 Installing drivers on firstboot sometimes fail with PnP service not available [rhel-9.7] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-108174 selinux-relabel doesn't work across filesystem boundaries (because setfiles doesn't) [rhel-9.7] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-125955 virt-inspector detect if AV/GPOs are present in a VM [guestfs tools] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-144074 Expose XFS version in virt-filesystems https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-170706 Virt-customize firstboot scripts (on Windows) should be able to skip reboots https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-170708 Document that exit code 249 means we retry the firstboot script (Win‐ dows only) https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-171896 virt-v2v failing with binary LUKS keys [guestfs-tools] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-94873 Need to update uri to https:// for conf file in /etc/virt-builder/re‐ pos.d [rhel-10.1] SEE ALSO http://libguestfs.org/ AUTHORS Christopher Byrne Cole Robinson Fazle Arefin Fco. Javier F. Serrador pulsarrush Rafael Fontenelle Richard W.M. Jones Srihari Parimi Temuri Doghonadze Yuri Chornoivan -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com nbdkit - Flexible, fast NBD server with plugins https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/nbdkit