[Libguestfs] virt-sysprep future

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 10:02:11AM +0800, Wanlong Gao wrote:
> Hi Rich,
> 
> > What's the plan for virt-sysprep?
> > 
> > It's an interesting proof-of-concept.
> > 
> > People love it!
> > 
> > But it has several shortcomings.  As I said before, I think it should
> > be spun off into a separate project, and possibly be rewritten
> > (/bin/bash is a terrible language for writing complicated things).  It
> > really needs to support at least some Windows guests to some degree.
> > 
> > Any thoughts on this?
> 
> 
> Yes, I also think it should be spun off into a separate project, and be
> rewritten. But I want you doing the splitting work if you have time, and
> then I can try to rewrite it and do further works.

Ha ha, but you know I'm going to rewrite it in OCaml :-)

> And I considered trying to use NBD though it. NBD has already used in qemu
> named qemu-nbd, support all the virtual disk image, and the most important
> thing is that it's much more faster than guestmount, because it doesn't need
> to start a guest. But NBD client must be used under root, because it uses
> /dev/nbdX, and need to install the kernel nbd module.
> 
> What do you think Rich?

With my RHEL hat on, NBD wouldn't be any use because we don't support
it, so we couldn't ship such a modified virt-sysprep in RHEL.

I'm not clear why NBD is useful though.  nbd+kpartx is much more
limited than libguestfs.  If guestmount is slow for you, let's work
out why it's slow and make it faster (it's not slow for _me_).

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any
software inside the virtual machine.  Supports Linux and Windows.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/