1 Libguestfs is a library for accessing and modifying guest disk images.
2 Amongst the things this is good for: making batch configuration
3 changes to guests, getting disk used/free statistics (see also:
4 virt-df), migrating between virtualization systems (see also:
5 virt-p2v), performing partial backups, performing partial guest
6 clones, cloning guests and changing registry/UUID/hostname info, and
9 Libguestfs uses Linux kernel and qemu code, and can access any type of
10 guest filesystem that Linux and qemu can, including but not limited
11 to: ext2/3/4, btrfs, FAT and NTFS, LVM, many different disk partition
12 schemes, qcow, qcow2, vmdk.
14 Libguestfs provides ways to enumerate guest storage (eg. partitions,
15 LVs, what filesystem is in each LV, etc.). It can also run commands
16 in the context of the guest. Also you can access filesystems over FTP.
18 Libguestfs is a library that can be linked with C and C++ management
19 programs (or management programs written in OCaml, Perl or Python).
20 You can also use it from shell scripts or the command line.
22 Libguestfs was written by Richard W.M. Jones (rjones@redhat.com).
23 For discussion please use the fedora-virt mailing list:
25 https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-virt
29 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
31 - recent QEMU with vmchannel support
37 - Augeas (http://augeas.net/)
39 - perldoc (pod2man, pod2text) to generate the manual pages and
42 - (Optional) Readline to have nicer command-line editing in guestfish.
44 - (Optional) OCaml if you want to rebuild the generated files, and
45 also to build the OCaml bindings
47 - (Optional) local Fedora mirror
49 - (Optional) Perl if you want to build the perl bindings
51 - (Optional) Python if you want to build the python bindings
53 Running ./configure will check you have all the requirements installed
58 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
60 Then make the daemon, library and root filesystem:
62 ./configure [--with-mirror=URI]
65 Use the optional --with-mirror parameter to specify the URI of a local
66 Fedora mirror. See the discussion of the MIRROR parameter in the
67 febootstrap(8) manpage.
69 Finally run the tests:
73 If everything works, you can install the library and tools by running
74 these commands as root:
79 Notes on cross-architecture support
80 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
82 At the moment we basically don't support cross-architecture or
83 32-on-64. This limits what is possible for some guests. Filesystem
84 operations and FTP export will work fine, but running commands in
85 guests may not be possible.
87 To enable this requires work for cross-architecture and 32-on-64
88 support in febootstrap, fakeroot and fakechroot.
90 The daemon/ directory contains its own configure script. This is so
91 that in future we will be able to cross-compile the daemon.
95 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
97 Having a local Fedora mirror makes a massive difference to the time it
98 takes to build and rebuild initramfs images.
100 Failing that, use squid to cache yum downloads, but read this first:
101 https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/yum/2006-August/009041.html
102 (In brief, because yum chooses random mirrors each time, squid doesn't
103 work very well with default yum configuration. To get around this,
104 choose a Fedora mirror which is close to you, set this with
105 './configure --with-mirror=[...]', and then proxy the whole lot
106 through squid by setting http_proxy environment variable).
108 You will also need to substantially increase the squid configuration
110 http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Using_Mock_to_test_package_builds#Using_Squid_to_Speed_Up_Mock_package_downloads
112 IntelligentMirror is another possibility, although I couldn't get it
116 Copyright and license information
117 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
119 Copyright (C) 2009 Red Hat Inc.
121 The library is distributed under the LGPLv2+. The programs are
122 distributed under the GPLv2+. Please see the files COPYING and
123 COPYING.LIB for full license information.