[libvirt] [RFC] get guest OS infos

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 09:17:30AM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 01:51:33PM +0800, zhang bo wrote:
> > Different OSes have different capabilities and behaviors sometimes. We have to distinguish them then. 
> > 
> > For example, our clients want to send NMI interrupts to certain guests(eg.Linux distributions), but not others(eg.Windows guests).
> > They want to acquire the list below:
> >   guest1: RHEL 7
> >   guest2: RHEL 7
> >   guest3: Ubuntu 12
> >   guest4: Ubuntu 13
> >   guest5: Windows 7
> >   ......
> > 
> > AFAIK, neither libvirt nor openstack, nor qemu, have such capbility of showing these guest OS infos.
> > Libvirt now supports to show host capabilities and driver capability, but not an individual guest OS's capibility. We may refer to 
> > http://libvirt.org/formatdomaincaps.html for more information.
> > 
> > So, what's your opinion on adding such feature in libvirt and qemu?
> 
> This is normally something the higher level management app will
> remember and record. For example, RHEV/oVirt store a record of
> the OS when the guest is first provisioned. In OpenStack we are
> going to permit the user to set an image property flag to specify
> the guest OS, using libosinfo terminology
> 
> http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/nova-specs/specs/liberty/approved/libvirt-hardware-policy-from-libosinfo.html

One thing I could see us to is to define an official libosinfo
metadata schema. eg so there is a standized way to use the
libvirt <metadata> element to record the libosinfo operating
system for a guest, giving interoperability across different
apps. That doesn't really require any coding - just an update
in the libosinfo website with some docs about recommendations


Regards,
Daniel
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