<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12pt"><div><span>As with Rich, I was thinking of using rsync entirely within the guestfs appliance, ie syncing between two internally mounted filesystem.</span></div><div><span>Though, syncing with an external system is an interesting use case...</span></div><div><span><br></span></div><div><span>Thanks for the pointers on submitting patches. I hope to have some time in the next couple of weeks to try adding rysnc.</span></div><div><br><span></span></div><div><span>-Chris<br></span></div><div><br></div><div style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><div style="font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><hr size="1"><b><span style="font-weight:bold;">From:</span></b> Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@redhat.com><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">To:</span></b>
Tim Potter <tpot@hp.com><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Cc:</span></b> Chris Willmore <chris.willmore@yahoo.com>; "libguestfs@redhat.com" <libguestfs@redhat.com><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sent:</span></b> Thursday, May 26, 2011 10:41 AM<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Subject:</span></b> Re: [Libguestfs] rsync support<br></font><br>
On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 10:48:19AM +1000, Tim Potter wrote:<br>> On Tue, 2011-05-24 at 22:12 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:<br>> > On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 12:59:50PM -0700, Chris Willmore wrote:<br>> > > Has an rsync addition to libguestfs been considered? It would be<br>> > > great to have when copying the contents of a filesystem to a disk of<br>> > > a different filesystem. It could also be used to keep portions of<br>> > > cloned machines in sync. For example, I'm porting VirtualBox images<br>> > > to Xen. I sometimes make change to the source image that I would<br>> > > like to easily propagate to the Xen copy. DD is sometimes a bit too<br>> > > low-level.<br>> > <br>> > I think this makes sense. As a matter of getting changes in<br>> > libguestfs it's better to propose patches and APIs. You could test<br>> > this out by adding rsync to
appliance/packagelist.in, and then adding<br>> > some APIs to libguestfs (see [0] and example [1]). Post the patches<br>> > here and we can review them.<br>> <br>> Can I put in a vote for rsync as well? I think it would be a very<br>> useful addition to guestfs.<br>> <br>> I'm not sure how a streaming network protocol like rsync is going to fit<br>> in to guestfs's command/response protocol though. A generic method for<br>> forwarding TCP to qemu (host? guest? what's it called?) might be good,<br>> and also allow other commands that are implemented over a TCP/IP<br>> transport to be added as well.<br><br>I was thinking of rsync as a useful replacement for guestfs_dd or<br>guestfs_cp_a.<br><br>If you need to stream to and from the host over TCP then you're going<br>to have additional problems because QEMU's user network support is not<br>very high performance and has lots of other configuration
problems.<br>See guestfs_set_network.<br><br>Rich.<br><br>-- <br>Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones<br>virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines. Boot with a<br>live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests.<br>http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v<br><br><br></div></div></div></body></html>