[libvirt] esx driver: XML format for guest OS type/variant

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 03:16:00PM -0700, Eric Blake wrote:
> It may be worth adding an optional XML element that records a string to
> use for the guestOS argument.  In fact, the libguestfs tool suite
> already has some pretty decent ways to guess the OS of an arbitrary VM
> guest (even when using other hypervisors, like qemu-kvm, which don't
> have any counterpart of a guestOS argument in native format), but it
> takes several seconds to figure that out per domain.  libguestfs would
> certainly be pleased with a way to annotate guestOS details into an XML
> description, rather than having to relearn it every time.

Well libguestfs itself likely needs to inspect the disk every time
(eg. the operating system might have been upgraded since last time).
Also we don't necessarily have libvirt around - we can be asked to
inspect a raw disk image.

However I know that there was someone asking me if the inspection data
could be cached in the libvirt XML so that they could query it out
quickly later on.  Unfortunately I forget now who asked me this and
which project wanted it (maybe Chris Lalancette??).

Rich.

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