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.
-Libguestfs was written by Richard W.M. Jones (rjones@redhat.com).
-For discussion please use the fedora-virt mailing list:
+Libguestfs was written by Richard W.M. Jones (rjones@redhat.com) and
+hacked on by lots of other people. For discussion, development,
+patches, etc. please use the mailing list:
- https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-virt
+ http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/libguestfs
Home page
- squashfs-tools (mksquashfs only)
+- genisoimage / mkisofs
+
- (Optional) Augeas (http://augeas.net/)
- perldoc (pod2man, pod2text) to generate the manual pages and
- (Optional) GHC if you want to build the Haskell bindings
+- (Optional) Perl XML::XPath, Sys::Virt modules (for libvirt support
+in virt-inspector).
+
+- (Optional, but highly recommended) perl-libintl for translating perl code.
+
Running ./configure will check you have all the requirements installed
on your machine.
Debian
----------------------------------------------------------------------
-libguestfs should build and run on Debian.
+libguestfs is now built as a package in Debian by Guido Gunther and
+the other Debian libvirt maintainers. See:
+
+http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianLibvirtTeam#Packages
-febootstrap, yum, rpm, fakeroot, fakechroot are all packaged in
-Debian.
+You can build for Debian in two different ways, either building a
+Fedora-based appliance using febootstrap, yum, rpm, fakeroot,
+fakechroot (all packaged in Debian). However the recommended way is
+to build a Debian-based appliance using debootstrap and debirf.
-Please see the fedora-virt mailing list for the status of libguestfs
-in Debian.
+Both ways are supported by the configure script.
qemu
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.
+
+However we still offer the ability to use vmchannel, and in future we
+may add support for other types of qemu, which is useful in a few
+cases, specifically where qemu packagers decide to compile out support
+for SLIRP (qemu packagers: please don't do this).
+
+
Supermin appliance
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git.annexia.org / libguestfs.git / blobdiff