[libvirt] libguestfs integration: rich disk access for libvirt applications

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 11:14:57AM +0100, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 12:55 PM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:
> > To put this all into one place:
> >
> > (1) An ugly new libvirt API that runs febootstrap-supermin-helper to
> > create the appliance.
> [...]
> > I'm worried about item (1) in this list ...
> 
> This is the only instance where libvirt knows about libguestfs.  All
> other steps are libguest only or involve libguestfs knowing about
> libvirt.
> 
> Would it be possible introduce a "domain-builder" concept into
> libvirt?  When libguestfs is installed it drops a domain-builder
> configuration/script that libvirt can pick up.  Then you can say
> something like virDomainBuild(name="guestfs-appliance",
> builder="guestfs").

We do have a historical syntax from Xen paravirt which lets us call out
to a helper at boot time, namely the "<bootloader>" element. With Xen
this is typically something like pygrub, or pxegrub, which does some
work and writes out a kernel+initrd into temporary files, and prints
the file paths + any kernel args on stdout.

We could just wire up this concept in KVM too without any real trouble,
and then we could have guestfs-bootloader script todo the magic setup


Regards,
Daniel
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