[fedora-virt] [RFC/PATCH] libguestfs: build Debian based appliance

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 12:18:30AM +0200, Guido Günther wrote:
> The first once sets DIST=DEBIAN or DIST=REDHAT if using debootstrap or
> febootstrap respectively. This allows us to set distro specific package
> lists as discussed at Fudcon.

OK, I pushed this one as is:

http://git.et.redhat.com/?p=libguestfs.git;a=commitdiff;h=b4fade6392ccb2961f0d7e2bf45dfc2e20333aed

> The second one checks for udev and uses that instead of doing everything
> by hand. This significantly speeds up booting of the appliance since
> each MAKEDEV call tages ages here and simplifies the code since we don't
> need any device probing.

I modified your patch slightly to add Fedora udev support.  As you
say, it works better than doing explicit MAKEDEVs:

http://git.et.redhat.com/?p=libguestfs.git;a=commitdiff;h=284797c1561e5e089986027d469bd16ee1a983df

> The third one explicitly sets the device type of attached disk to SCSI,
> otherwise the tests end up as hda with my version of qemu. Since future
> versions might pick virtio by default this is probaly safer anyway.

This one is a bit of trouble.  It broke Fedora support, but I think
was just because the sym53c8xx.ko module was missing from my
appliance.  I'm going to try with that.

I'm slightly doubtful about what is going on here, because the tests
are *supposed* to deal with the case where devices are named /dev/hda
etc.  See:

http://libguestfs.org/guestfs.3.html#block_device_naming

However your patch could be an improvement if it means that devices
are always named /dev/sd*, even on our older versions of RHEL.

Rich.

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