- RWMJ
-Python bindings
----------------
-
-Ideas for the Python bindings:
-https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-April/msg00114.html
-
-FTP server or FUSE?
--------------------
-
-Originally we had intended to implement an NFS server inside the
-appliance, which would allow the guest filesystems to be mounted on
-the host, and large changes to be made. We eventually rejected the
-idea of using NFS, partly because it requires root to mount
-filesystems in the host, and partly because of problems handling UID
-mappings between host and guest filesystem.
-
-Then we look at implementing an FTP server instead. FTP clients are
-widely available for many languages, don't require root, and don't
-have any UID mapping problems. However there is the problem of
-getting the TCP connection into the guest, and that FTP requires a
-secondary data connection either in or out of the guest (the NFS
-situation is even more dire).
-
-Thirdly we looked at implementing a FUSE-based filesystem. This is
-plausible - it could be implemented just by adding the additional FUSE
-operations to the standard guestfs(3) API, and then implementing a
-simple FUSE daemon. (The FUSE website has some very helpful
-documentation and examples). I [RWMJ] am not particularly convinced
-that a FUSE-based filesystem would really be useful to anyone, but am
-prepared to accept patches if someone does all the work.
-
-See also the mountlo project:
-http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=121684&package_id=150116
-
-BufferIn
+FUSE API
--------
-BufferIn should turn into <char *, int> and simple strings in other
-languages that can handle 8 bit clean strings.
+The API needs more test coverage, particularly lesser-used system
+calls.
-Limit on transfers would still be 2MB for these types.
- - then implement write-file properly
+The big unresolved issue is UID/GID mapping between guest filesystem
+IDs and the host. It's not easy to automate this because you need
+extra details about the guest itself in order to get to its
+UID->username map (eg. /etc/passwd from the guest).
febootstrap / debootstrap inside appliance
------------------------------------------
Should we bother having the daemon at all and just link the guestfsd
code directly into libguestfs?
-PPC problems
-------------
-
-[This section should be filed as bugs, but no one seems to care for
-PPC hosts and the hardware is rapidly becoming obsolete]
-
- ppc (32 bit) works with qemu from git, however there is no serial console
-
- ppc64 requires extra parameters:
- -M mac99 -cpu ppc64
- however it still fails:
- invalid/unsupported opcode: 01 - 01 - 1a (06301e83) 00000000018c2738 1
- invalid bits: 00400000 for opcode: 0b - 19 - 15 (2d746572) 0000000000009230
-
- no serial console in ppc or ppc64 because no one can tell us what
- console=ttyXX option to use
-
Supermin appliance to febootstrap
---------------------------------
General glibc / core programs:
chgrp
- dd (?)
- utime / utimes / futimes / futimens / l..
more mk*temp calls
- some sort of alloc/fallocate/posix_fallocate call to create empty space
- trunc[ate??]
ext2 properties:
chattr
pivot_root
fts(3) / ftw(3)
-Swap space
-----------
-
-Allow swap space from the guest to be used. Is it a good idea?
-
Other initrd-* commands
-----------------------
Currently we can't do Perl "one-liners". ie. The current syntax for
any short Perl one-liner would be:
- perl -MSys::Guestfs -e '$g = Sys::Guestfs->new(); $g->add_drive ("foo"); $g->launch; $g->wait_ready; $g->mount ("/dev/sda1", "/"); ....'
+ perl -MSys::Guestfs -e '$g = Sys::Guestfs->new(); $g->add_drive ("foo"); $g->launch; $g->mount ("/dev/sda1", "/"); ....'
You can see we're well beyond a single line just getting to the point
of adding drives and mounting.
$h->set_autosync (1);
$h->add_drive_ro ($filename);
$h->launch ();
- $h->wait_ready ();
$h->mount_ro (\"/dev/sda1\", \"/\");
Command-line form would be:
perl -MSys::Guestfs::One -e 'inspect("guest.img"); cat ("/etc/fstab");'
How would editing files work?
+
+ntfsclone
+---------
+
+Useful imaging tool:
+http://man.linux-ntfs.org/ntfsclone.8.html
+
+virt-rescue pty
+---------------
+
+See:
+http://search.cpan.org/~rgiersig/IO-Tty-1.08/Pty.pm
+http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=582185
+
+Note that pty requires cooperation inside the C code too (there are
+two sides to a pty, and one has to be handled after the fork).
+
+Windows-based daemon/appliance
+------------------------------
+
+See discussion on list:
+https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2009-November/msg00165.html
+
+qemu locking
+------------
+
+Add -drive file=...,lock=exclusive and -drive file=...,lock=shared
+
+Change libguestfs and libvirt to do the right thing, so that multiple
+instances of qemu cannot stomp on each other.
+
+virt-disk-explore
+-----------------
+
+For multi-level disk images such as live CDs:
+http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/unpack-the-russian-doll-of-a-f11-live-cd/
+
+It's possible with libguestfs to recursively look for anything that
+might be a filesystem, mount-{,loop} it and look in those, revealing
+anything in a disk image.
+
+However this won't work easily for VM disk images in the disk image.
+One would have to download those to the host and launch another
+libguestfs instance.
+
+List, mount filesystems by UUID and label
+-----------------------------------------
+
+[See related:
+http://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2009-August/msg00031.html]
+
+List filesystems by UUID or label.
+
+Mount filesystems by UUID or label. (I'm not really sure if we can do
+this at the moment but we ought to be able to do it, and perhaps make
+it easier by having a direct command).
+
+Map filesystems to disk blocks
+------------------------------
+
+Map files/filesystems/(any other object) to the actual disk
+blocks they occupy.
+
+And vice versa.
+
+Is it even possible?
+
+Integration with host intrusion systems
+---------------------------------------
+
+Perfect way to monitor VMs from outside the VM. Look for file
+hashes, log events, login/logout etc.
+
+http://www.ossec.net/
+http://la-samhna.de/samhain/
+http://sourceforge.net/projects/aide/
+http://osiris.shmoo.com/
+http://sourceforge.net/projects/tripwire/
+
+Resizing, shrinking, specifying sizes in guestfish
+--------------------------------------------------
+
+Owing to an oversight we don't really supporting shrinking
+filesystems. See:
+
+https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=585221
+https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=585222
+https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=585223
+
+But a related problem is how to specify sizes to guestfish, ie. "100M"
+or "1G". Currently the specific alloc and sparse functions contain
+code to parse these size strings, but that cannot be used anywhere
+else that would take a byte count. This is awkward because some
+commands take units of megabytes (lvresize, sfdiskM) or sectors
+(part-add), with no unifying theme.
git.annexia.org / libguestfs.git / blobdiff