1 TODO list for libguestfs
2 ======================================================================
4 This list contains random ideas and musings on features we could add
5 to libguestfs in future.
12 The API needs more test coverage, particularly lesser-used system
15 The big unresolved issue is UID/GID mapping between guest filesystem
16 IDs and the host. It's not easy to automate this because you need
17 extra details about the guest itself in order to get to its
18 UID->username map (eg. /etc/passwd from the guest).
23 BufferIn should turn into <char *, int> and simple strings in other
24 languages that can handle 8 bit clean strings.
26 Limit on transfers would still be 2MB for these types.
27 - then implement write-file properly
29 febootstrap / debootstrap inside appliance
30 ------------------------------------------
32 This was originally proposed as a way to install new operating systems
33 in the appliance. However no one has come up with a workable
39 Complete the Haskell bindings (see discussion on haskell-cafe).
44 Complete the bind tests - must test the return values and error cases.
46 virt-inspector - make libvirt XML
47 ---------------------------------
49 It should be possible to generate libvirt XML from virt-inspector
50 data, at least partially. This would be just another output type so:
52 virt-inspector --libvirt guest.img
54 Note that recent versions of libvirt/virt-install allow guests to be
55 imported, so this is not so useful any more.
57 "Standalone/local mode"
58 -----------------------
60 Instead of running guestfsd (the daemon) inside qemu, there should be
61 an option to just run guestfsd directly.
63 The architecture in this mode would look like:
78 (1) This only makes sense if we are running as root.
80 (2) There is no console / kernel messages in this configuration, but
81 we might consider capturing stderr from the daemon.
83 (3) guestfs_config and guestfs_add_drive become no-ops.
85 Obviously in this configuration, commands are run directly on the
86 local machine's disks. You could just run the commands themselves
87 directly, but libguestfs provides a convenient API and language
88 bindings. Also deals with tricky stuff like parsing the output of the
89 LVM commands. Also we get to leverage other code such as
92 This is mainly useful from live CDs, ie. virt-p2v.
94 Should we bother having the daemon at all and just link the guestfsd
95 code directly into libguestfs?
97 Supermin appliance to febootstrap
98 ---------------------------------
100 Supermin appliance functionality should be moved into febootstrap.
102 Ideas for extra commands
103 ------------------------
105 General glibc / core programs:
132 Other initrd-* commands
133 -----------------------
140 Simple editing of configuration files
141 -------------------------------------
143 Some easy non-Augeas methods to edit configuration files.
146 replace /etc/file key value
148 which would look in /etc/file for any instances of
154 and replace them with
160 That would solve about 50% of reconfiguration needs, and for the
161 rest you'd use Augeas, 'download'+'upload' or 'edit'.
163 RWMJ: I had a go at implementing this, but it's quite error-prone to
164 do this sort of editing inside the C-based daemon code. It's far
165 better to do it with Augeas, or else to use an external language like
171 Currently we can't do Perl "one-liners". ie. The current syntax for
172 any short Perl one-liner would be:
174 perl -MSys::Guestfs -e '$g = Sys::Guestfs->new(); $g->add_drive ("foo"); $g->launch; $g->mount ("/dev/sda1", "/"); ....'
176 You can see we're well beyond a single line just getting to the point
177 of adding drives and mounting.
181 $h = create ($filename, \"/dev/sda1\" => \"/\");
183 $h = create ([$file1, $file2], \"/dev/sda1\" => \"/\");
185 To mount read-only, add C<ro =E<gt> 1> like this:
187 $h = create ($filename, \"/dev/sda1\" => \"/\", ro => 1);
189 which is equivalent to the following sequence of calls:
191 $h = Sys::Guestfs->new ();
192 $h->set_autosync (1);
193 $h->add_drive_ro ($filename);
195 $h->mount_ro (\"/dev/sda1\", \"/\");
197 Command-line form would be:
199 perl -MSys::Guestfs=:all -e '$_=create("guest.img", "/dev/sda1" => "/"); $_->cat ("/etc/fstab");'
201 That's not brief enough for one-liners, so we could have an extra
202 autogenerated module which creates a Sys::Guestfs handle singleton
203 (the handle is an implicit global variable as in guestfish), eg:
205 perl -MSys::Guestfs::One -e 'inspect("guest.img"); cat ("/etc/fstab");'
207 How would editing files work?
213 http://man.linux-ntfs.org/ntfsclone.8.html
219 http://search.cpan.org/~rgiersig/IO-Tty-1.08/Pty.pm
220 http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=582185
222 Note that pty requires cooperation inside the C code too (there are
223 two sides to a pty, and one has to be handled after the fork).
225 Windows-based daemon/appliance
226 ------------------------------
228 See discussion on list:
229 https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2009-November/msg00165.html
234 Add -drive file=...,lock=exclusive and -drive file=...,lock=shared
236 Change libguestfs and libvirt to do the right thing, so that multiple
237 instances of qemu cannot stomp on each other.
242 For multi-level disk images such as live CDs:
243 http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/unpack-the-russian-doll-of-a-f11-live-cd/
245 It's possible with libguestfs to recursively look for anything that
246 might be a filesystem, mount-{,loop} it and look in those, revealing
247 anything in a disk image.
249 However this won't work easily for VM disk images in the disk image.
250 One would have to download those to the host and launch another
253 List, mount filesystems by UUID and label
254 -----------------------------------------
257 http://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2009-August/msg00031.html]
259 List filesystems by UUID or label.
261 Mount filesystems by UUID or label. (I'm not really sure if we can do
262 this at the moment but we ought to be able to do it, and perhaps make
263 it easier by having a direct command).
265 Map filesystems to disk blocks
266 ------------------------------
268 Map files/filesystems/(any other object) to the actual disk
275 Integration with host intrusion systems
276 ---------------------------------------
278 Perfect way to monitor VMs from outside the VM. Look for file
279 hashes, log events, login/logout etc.
281 http://www.ossec.net/
282 http://la-samhna.de/samhain/
283 http://sourceforge.net/projects/aide/
284 http://osiris.shmoo.com/
285 http://sourceforge.net/projects/tripwire/
287 Resizing, shrinking, specifying sizes in guestfish
288 --------------------------------------------------
290 Owing to an oversight we don't really supporting shrinking
293 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=585221
294 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=585222
295 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=585223
297 But a related problem is how to specify sizes to guestfish, ie. "100M"
298 or "1G". Currently the specific alloc and sparse functions contain
299 code to parse these size strings, but that cannot be used anywhere
300 else that would take a byte count. This is awkward because some
301 commands take units of megabytes (lvresize, sfdiskM) or sectors
302 (part-add), with no unifying theme.