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

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Nov 15, 2007 at 11:49:17AM -0800, Robert Nelson wrote:
> Hugh O. Brock wrote:
> >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"? 
> >
> >  
> 
> Virt-Manager names the target disknodes xvda, xvdb, etc.   OpenSolaris 
> requires 0, 1, 2, etc.
> 
> >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?
> >
> >  
> 
> I'll take another look at the Installer class and see if it can be done 
> there.

In the virtinst/FullVirtGuest.py  class, there is already a bunch of 
OS specific metadata, eg what of mouse to use, apic/acpi/pae settings,
whether the installer is multi-stage reboots (eg Windows). I'd recommend
moving this metadata into virtinst/DistroManager and have a bunch of
methods in that module for querying distro specific metadata, from the
Installer class.

Dan.
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