Libguestfs provides ways to enumerate guest storage (eg. partitions,
LVs, what filesystem is in each LV, etc.). It can also run commands
-in the context of the guest. Also you can access filesystems over FTP.
+in the context of the guest. Also you can access filesystems over
+FUSE.
Libguestfs is a library that can be linked with C and C++ management
-programs (or management programs written in OCaml, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java
-or Haskell). You can also use it from shell scripts or the command line.
+programs (or management programs written in OCaml, Perl, Python, Ruby,
+Java, PHP, Haskell or C#). You can also use it from shell scripts or the
+command line.
Libguestfs was written by Richard W.M. Jones (rjones@redhat.com) and
hacked on by lots of other people. For discussion, development,
Requirements
----------------------------------------------------------------------
-- recent QEMU >= 0.10 with vmchannel support
- http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2009-02/msg01042.html
+- recent QEMU >= 0.12 with virtio-serial support
-- febootstrap >= 2.3
+- febootstrap >= 2.10
- fakeroot
- XDR, rpcgen (on Linux these are provided by glibc)
+- pcre (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions C library) (optional)
+
+- libmagic (the library that corresponds to the 'file' command) (optional)
+
+- libvirt (optional)
+
+- libxml2 (optional)
+
+- Augeas (http://augeas.net/) (optional)
+
+- gperf
+
- squashfs-tools (mksquashfs only)
-- (Optional) Augeas (http://augeas.net/)
+- genisoimage / mkisofs
+
+- hivex >= 1.2.1 (http://libguestfs.org/download)
+
+- (Optional) FUSE to build the FUSE module
- perldoc (pod2man, pod2text) to generate the manual pages and
other documentation.
- (Optional) Readline to have nicer command-line editing in guestfish.
-- (Optional) 'reged' program from chntpw to decode Windows registry
- entries (http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/)
+- (Optional) xmllint to validate virt-inspector RELAX NG schema
- (Optional) OCaml if you want to rebuild the generated files, and
also to build the OCaml bindings
- (Optional, but highly recommended) perl-libintl for translating perl code.
+- (Optional) po4a for translating manpages and POD files.
+
+- (Optional) PHP, phpize if you want to build the PHP bindings
+
Running ./configure will check you have all the requirements installed
on your machine.
By far the most common problem is with broken or incompatible
qemu releases.
-First of all, you need qemu >= 0.10.4, which contains a vmchannel
-implementation. There are several, conflicting, incompatible things
-called 'vmchannel' which at one time or another have been added or
-proposed for qemu/KVM. The _only_ one we support is this one:
-
- http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2009-02/msg01042.html
-
-Secondly, different versions of qemu have problems booting the
-appliance for different reasons. This varies between versions of
-qemu, and Linux distributions which add their own patches.
+Different versions of qemu have problems booting the appliance for
+different reasons. This varies between versions of qemu, and Linux
+distributions which add their own patches.
If you find a problem, you could try using your own qemu built from
source (qemu is very easy to build from source), with a 'qemu
need to make edits to the udev configuration.
+vmchannel
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Previous versions of libguestfs required something called "vmchannel".
+Vmchannel is a special device given to virtual machines which allows
+them to communicate in some way with the host, often (but not always)
+without using a traditional network device. In reality, there is no
+one thing called "vmchannel". This idea has been reimplemented
+several times under the name vmchannel, and other hypervisors have
+their own incompatible implementation(s) too.
+
+In libguestfs <= 1.0.71, we required a specific vmchannel which is
+properly known as "guestfwd" and has been upstream in qemu since here:
+
+ http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2009-02/msg01042.html
+
+In libguestfs >= 1.0.71 we don't require any vmchannel implementation,
+as long as qemu has been compiled with support for SLIRP (user mode
+networking, or "-net user"), which is almost always the case.
+
+In libguestfs >= 1.5.4 we switched again to using qemu's virtio-serial
+and removed all the other vmchannels and the SLIRP channel.
+
+
Supermin appliance
----------------------------------------------------------------------
At the moment we basically don't support cross-architecture or
32-on-64. This limits what is possible for some guests. Filesystem
-operations and FTP export will work fine, but running commands in
-guests may not be possible.
+operations and FUSE will work fine, but running commands in guests may
+not be possible.
To enable this requires work for cross-architecture and 32-on-64
support in febootstrap, fakeroot and fakechroot.
- python
- rpm-python http://www.rpm.org/
- yum http://yum.baseurl.org/
- - febootstrap http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/febootstrap/
+ - febootstrap http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/febootstrap/
Copyright and license information
----------------------------------------------------------------------
-Copyright (C) 2009 Red Hat Inc.
+Copyright (C) 2009-2010 Red Hat Inc.
The library is distributed under the LGPLv2+. The programs are
distributed under the GPLv2+. Please see the files COPYING and
git.annexia.org / libguestfs.git / blobdiff