[et-mgmt-tools] Virt-Manager: Supporting additional para-virtual OS's

[Hugh O. Brock]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2007 at 11:50:47PM -0800, Robert Nelson wrote:
> I've been trying to add support for additional para-virtual operating 
> systems (OpenSolaris and Debian) to virt-manager.  There is no problem 
> getting the initial kernel and ramdisk, however there is no way to 
> specify the target disk node based on the OS or distro.  Also some OS's 
> don't support the virtual frame buffer driver but there is no way to 
> prevent the XML for it being created.
> 
> I can't see how this could be done without doing some major 
> restructuring of the code and creating a new class to encapsulate all 
> the target specific information.  Is there any plan on doing something 
> like this?  If someone were to do it, are the changes likely to be 
> incorporated?

Hello Robert, thanks for your interest.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "specify the target disk
node based on the OS or distro"? 

I would have no problem with adding a checkbox to virt-manager that
would have the effect of passing the --nographics flag to virtinst if
you can determine a good place to do it. I don't think we want to
spend a whole ton of time creating a new class to take different PV
guest OSes into account, though. Having said that, have you looked at
the *Installer class family in virtinst? Is there a way we could
extend that to do what you need?

Take care,
--Hugh