[fedora-virt] libguestfs 1.0.55 released

[Richard W.M. Jones]

We are very pleased to announce release 1.0.55 of libguestfs, the
library for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images.

  Home page: http://libguestfs.org/
  Download:  http://libguestfs.org/download/libguestfs-1.0.55.tar.gz

Thanks go to Guido Gunther, Matt Booth and Jim Meyering for their
contributions, and Charles Duffy, Yaakov Nemoy and SALstar for
pointing out bugs and misc fixes.

The number of changes in 1.0.55 (even over the previous release 3 days
ago) is large, and compared to earlier versions we've added dozens of
extra commands and features.  The best thing to do is to refer to the
copious changelog:

  http://git.et.redhat.com/?p=libguestfs.git;a=log

A brief list of the highlights:

 - Debian native (debootstrap, debirf) support

 - guestfish -i <dom> (use libvirt+virt-inspector to mount partitions)

 - #!/usr/bin/guestfish -f (for scripts)

 - new, simpler partitioning command 'sfdiskM'

 - guestfish commands: time, glob, more, less

 - removal of the generated code from the git repo

 - new commands: readdir, mknod*, umask, du, df*, head*, tail*, wc*,
   mkdtemp, scrub, sh, sh-lines.

 - many improvements to virt-inspector and YAML output

 - loopback mounts in the guest now work

For this release we were intending to switch to using virtio block
devices[1], but hit a performance regression[2].  Although we think we
have solved the performance problem, this release still defaults to
using emulated IDE devices, but you can try out virtio by using
'./configure --with-drive-if=virtio'.  In future we intend to switch
to using virtio by default, but packagers will still be able to choose
to use IDE (or SCSI) with the --with-drive-if option.

  [1]http://git.et.redhat.com/?p=libguestfs.git;a=commitdiff;h=4513f2ec7b6aa843005ba886cdd1747b6ff00915
  [2]https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=509383

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
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