[Libguestfs] virt-sysprep future

[Wanlong Gao]

On 03/17/2012 06:49 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:

> 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 :-)


Rich,

I'd like to know when will you work out the virt-sysprep in Ocaml ? :-D

Thanks,
Wanlong Gao

> 
>> 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.
>