[fedora-virt] ANNOUNCE: libguestfs 1.0.15 released

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Tue Apr 28 16:57:37 UTC 2009


On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 06:46:49PM +0200, Ján ONDREJ (SAL) wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 05:34:32PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > I'm pleased to announce version 1.0.15 of libguestfs, the library for
> > accessing and modifying virtual machine filesystems.
> 
> Good news. :)
> 
> Can you also add fsck to supported commands?
> 
> This worked:
> 
> guestfish -a /home/images/rawhide.img -m /dev/sda2
> # /proc is required to use fsck
> command "mount /proc"
> # devices are not created in dev, so I need to create them
> command "/sbin/MAKEDEV /dev/sda"
> command "/sbin/MAKEDEV /dev/sda1"
> # Autorepair with "-y" need to be used, otherwise it will only display
> # error, that interactive mode can't be used.
> command "/sbin/fsck /dev/sda1 -f -y"

Yeah, this is very hairy.

Can you come up with a patch which adds an fsck command, just running
off the initramfs?  It won't need to mount anything or make device
nodes.

> At least /proc and /dev files can be useful for users.

/proc and /dev should probably be bind-mounted into the /sysroot, but
only while external commands are running (otherwise it'll break
mounting).  That's a different matter though.

> But for one filesystem this only displayed:
> e2fsck: Cannot continue, aborting.
> No more information.
> 
> Which version of kvm>74 is fully functional? What is status of Fedora 10
> new virt packages (rebuild packages from F11/F12)?

There's no chance of libguestfs for Fedora 10, because the qemu
maintainers aren't interested in pulling back vmchannel support into
that old qemu 0.9 package in F-10.

Fedora 11+ should be OK though.  I'm still trying to shepherd the
review through.

> After some tests with new virt packages, my qemu qcow2 partitions have been
> corrupted and I was unable to install new or use my old virtual machines.

That sounds like the general problem with qemu & qcow2, which is
that there are various data corrupters :-(

If you run libguestfs without write privileges to the guests, then it
can't corrupt your filesystems ...

I usually do 'chmod o+r /dev/mapper/Guests-foo' and then run guestfish
as non-root.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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