[Libguestfs] Standalone guestfs

[Gabriel]

On Sat, 01 Jun 2013 20:54:15 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 01, 2013 at 02:27:50PM +0000, Gabriel de Perthuis wrote:
>> Hello,
>> As I understand it guestfs appliances normally work as servers
>> and run high-level commands from some external channel.
>
> This is the normal architecture when you're using libguestfs to access
> a VM or disk image:
>
>   http://libguestfs.org/guestfs.3.html#architecture
>
>> But it might be possible to bundle a guestfish script to run
>> commands from and do away with the external system.
>> That would make it useful on non-virtualised systems.
>
> It's worth noting you can edit any device, including host devices
> directly.  For example on my laptop:
>
> It's also possible to get libguestfs to connect to an arbitrary
> socket, so-called 'libguestfs live'.  That could include a guestfsd
> daemon running on the local host.  Run the daemon and set
> LIBGUESTFS_BACKEND=unix:/path/to/some/socket
>
>   http://libguestfs.org/guestfs.3.html#backend
>   https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/how-does-libguestfs-live-work/#content
>
> It would also be possible to run qemu-nbd or sshd on a physical
> machine and access it using libguestfs (>= 1.22) from another machine.
> Indeed this is a possible architecture under discussion for the new
> version of virt-v2v.
>
> Hope that gives you some ideas.  If you have a specific use scenario
> you are interested in, then please let us know.

I was thinking of running some operations on the root filesystem
by kexec-rebooting into an appliance to get exclusive access.
I would like to do something like that for my blocks tool
(which does conversions to LVM and bcache).

https://github.com/g2p/blocks#readme