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

[Robert Nelson]

Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> 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.
>   
I spent some time reworking the virtinst code to support OpenSolaris and 
make it much easier to support additional OSes.  I've attached the patch 
file to get some feedback on the work so far.

Unfortunately a bunch for the code from virtinst is duplicated in 
virt-manager in the Add Device code.  This means either moving it back 
to virtinst with the appropriate additional APIs or duplicating work in 
virt-manager.

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