[Libguestfs] Windows port of daemon?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 03:40:32PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> Discuss?

Well deafening silence all round :-)  I'll add some other thoughts.

The obvious base for this seems to be Windows PE (Preinstallation
Environment), a kind of small kernel-only/appliance environment for
Windows:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Windows_PE

Can Windows PE use a serial console?  How much RAM does it require?
Can it operate without any form of graphics / video card?

The current Linux appliance is well-behaved: It outputs messages to
the serial console (which libguestfs clients can capture[1] or
ignore).  It doesn't require a graphical display (no X, SDL etc).  It
exits cleanly if the daemon dies.  Can a Windows appliance do the
same?

I know next to nothing about how to create such images.  Maybe someone
can help here?  We'd need either the equivalent of an febootstrap-type
appliance builder, or (more likely) a well-documented manual process.
Because we don't want to build this as part of 'make', having a manual
process that people can follow, backed up with legal binary downloads
is reasonable.

Porting guestfsd should be straightforward.  There is the issue of how
many external commands to port, because a few guestfsd functions are
implemented by running some external command like /sbin/parted.  Most
are standard utilities which should exist on Windows already via other
projects such as MinGW.  I would say: as many as already exist and/or
can be easily compiled on Windows, and any that are hard to port don't
bother too much.

A final note: This is different from porting libguestfs (ie. the
client library) to run on Windows, which is a worthwhile project in
itself but completely separate from this project.

Rich.

[1] http://libguestfs.org/guestfs.3.html#guestfs_set_log_message_callback

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
New in Fedora 11: Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows
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