[Libguestfs] guestmount without fstab

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 10:26:18AM +0100, Frantisek Kluknavsky wrote:
> On 02/23/2016 08:42 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 06:21:34PM +0100, Pino Toscano wrote:
> >> On Tuesday 23 February 2016 15:21:17 Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> >>> As for the particular question about lack of /etc/fstab.  Are you
> >>> getting some kind of error when using the guestmount -i option?  It
> >>> used to be (a long time ago) that libguestfs inspection[1] could not
> >>> handle guests that did not have /etc/fstab, but that should be fixed
> >>> in recent versions.
> >>
> >> Not really: /etc/fstab is currently used [1] as criteria to detect
> >> whether the content of a partition is the root of a Linux installation.
> > 
> > Yup - you're totally right.  I was confusing that with the bug we used
> > to have if /etc/fstab was empty (RHBZ#1113156).
> > 
> > Something to fix with the new inspection code :-)
> > 
> > Rich.
> > 
> 
> My intended use-case was to mount a container image that lacks kernel,
> fstab and bootloader, not a full virtual machine. Thank you very much
> for the explanation. I will try different approaches.

There are two parts to this question.

(1) Does inspection of such a disk image work?  Answer: not at the
moment, but Pino is working on fixing that.

(2) Can you mount it anyway.  YES: You don't need inspection to mount
disk images.

Please look at my original answer in detail, especially the links I
posted.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2016-February/msg00197.html

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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