[et-mgmt-tools] 'arch' in image XML

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Jul 04, 2008 at 06:17:19PM +0100, John Levon wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 04, 2008 at 05:22:19PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> 
> > The 'arch' is refering to the architecture of the guest OS kernel, eg one
> > of i686, x86_64, ppc, sparc, etc, etc.  The 'virsh capabilities' XML for
> > a hypervisor driver declares what architectures the driver supports and
> > thus allows virt-image to determine whether it is capable of executing
> > the OS being requested. Some drivers like QEMU supported a whole suite
> > of architectures by virtue of doing emulation, others only support matching
> > host arch (eg Xen).
> 
> What do you mean? Xen most definitely runs i686 guest OSes on x86_64.

Yes, the capabilities information for Xen on x86_64 declares both i686
and x86_64 capabilities.

> 
> virt-image.py:217
> 
>             dom = guest.start_install(None, progresscb, options.replace)
> 
> Is this just using the install code as a shell, or something?

Yeah, I think this is just badly named methods here - I'm pretty sure
its just booting the guest.

> > The idea behind the virt-image/virt-unpack  association is that the 
> > virt-image XML defines a portable format for 'appliance' metadata
> > information (cf OVF) but not the distribution format (ZIP, tar.gz,
> > etc). So the virt-pack tool would doing bundling into ZIP files. 
> 
> Right. It's not yet clear what's the best way to deal with the
> unpack/pack step: maybe virt-convert could automatically handle it.
> Presumably we /do/ want to move virt-pack to be virt-convert too at some
> point.

Yeah, I think it'd be good to have it all in one tool - we need to decide
on this before I do the next release of virtinst code.

Daniel
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