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
- recent QEMU >= 0.10 with vmchannel support
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2009-02/msg01042.html
-- febootstrap >= 2.0
+- febootstrap >= 2.3
- fakeroot
- (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:
-febootstrap, yum, rpm, fakeroot, fakechroot are all packaged in
-Debian.
+http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianLibvirtTeam#Packages
-Please see the fedora-virt mailing list for the status of libguestfs
-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.
+
+Both ways are supported by the configure script.
qemu
need to make edits to the udev configuration.
+Supermin appliance
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+If you configure with --enable-supermin then we will build a supermin
+appliance (supermin = super-minimized). This is a very specialized
+appliance which is built on-the-fly at runtime (specifically, when you
+call guestfs_launch).
+
+The normal appliance is a self-contained Linux operating system, based
+on the Fedora/RHEL/CentOS Linux distro. So it contains a complete
+copy of all the libraries and programs needed, like kernel, libc,
+bash, coreutils etc etc.
+
+The supermin appliance removes the kernel and all the executable
+libraries and programs from the appliance. That just leaves a
+skeleton of config files and some data files, which is obviously
+massively smaller than the normal appliance. At runtime we rebuild
+the appliance on-the-fly from the libraries and programs on the host
+(eg. pulling in the real /lib/libc.so, the real /bin/bash etc.)
+
+Although this process of rebuilding the appliance each time sounds
+slow, it turns out to be faster than using the prebuilt appliance.
+(Most of the saving comes from not compressing the appliance - it
+transpires that decompressing the appliance is the slowest part of the
+whole boot sequence). On my machine, a new appliance can be built in
+under a fifth of a second, and the boot time is several seconds
+shorter.
+
+The big advantage of the supermin appliance for distributions like
+Fedora is that it gets security fixes automatically from the host, so
+there is no need to rebuild the whole of libguestfs for a security
+update in some underlying library.
+
+There are several DISADVANTAGES:
+
+It won't work at all except in very narrow, controlled cases like the
+Fedora packaging case. We control the dependencies of the libguestfs
+RPM tightly to ensure that the required binaries are actually present
+on the host.
+
+Furthermore there are certain unlikely changes in the packages on the
+host which could break a supermin appliance, eg. an updated library
+which depends on an additional data file.
+
+Also supermin appliances are subjected to changes in the host kernel
+which might break compatibility with qemu -- these are, of course,
+real bugs in any case.
+
+Lastly, supermin appliances really can't be moved between branches of
+distributions (eg. built on Fedora 12 and moved to Fedora 10) because
+they are not self-contained and they rely on certain libraries being
+around. You shouldn't do this anyway.
+
+Use supermin appliances with caution.
+
+
Notes on cross-architecture support
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git.annexia.org / libguestfs.git / blobdiff