[Libguestfs] Xen drivers for virt-builder images

[George Dunlap]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 7:27 PM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 07:04:06PM +0100, George Dunlap wrote:
>> Right, well after managing to work around our corporate transparent
>> caching proxy to actually get the new version, I've tested it and it
>> works great.  Thanks.
>
> Thanks for testing.  I'll make the same change to CentOS, but
> that will take a bit longer to build & upload.

The CentOS 6 and Scientific Linux 6 templates work fine already for some reason.

In fact, I've now tested all the templates, and they *all* have the
proper drivers, with the exception of fedora-19.  (And of course
rhel-7rc, which I guess will be going away soon now that RHEL 7 has
been released.)

fedora-18, all the ubuntus, all the debians, centos-6 and
scientificlinux-6 all boot out-of-the-box already.

>> * On the other hand, I suspect most distros will have a
>> libguestfs->libvirt dependency anyway.
>
> Upstream, I have steered away from using the libvirt backend.  Running
> qemu directly is the default.  The reason is that the libvirt backend
> adds complexity without a great deal of benefit for most users.
> [That's less true if we're talking about supporting Xen because there
> it gives us benefit by moving much of the Xen support code into
> libvirt.]
>
> In Fedora & RHEL we are using the libvirt backend by default, partly
> because me & Dan Berrange are around to support it, and partly because
> it allows us to use SELinux + cgroups to contain the qemu process
> (somewhat analogous to driver-domains in Xen).
>
> AFAIK no other distro uses the libvirt backend by default, but they
> all ship it and you can switch to it by setting an environment
> variable (whether it actually works or not is another question).
>
>> So it seems like going with #1 is probably the best, overall.
>
> I'm not going to implement the Xen backend myself, but patches welcome
> as they say.

Of course. :-)

Well I'll put it on a list of things to take a look at.

Thanks for your help,

 -George