Libguestfs - Nov 2010 - [ANNOUNCE] libguestfs 1.6.0 tools for accessing and modifying VM disk images

libguestfs is tools and a library for accessing and modifying virtual
machine disk images.

  Home page:  http://libguestfs.org/
     Source:  http://libguestfs.org/download/

I'm pleased to announce the latest stable release of libguestfs 1.6.0
which is available immediately from the website and through Fedora.

This represents an enormous amount of work over the last 4-5 months
and wouldn't have been possible without help and feedback from many
testers.  Thanks also to Matt Booth for patches and making virt-v2v great.

Here are the release notes (also at http://libguestfs.org/RELEASE-NOTES.txt )

Release notes for libguestfs 1.6.0
----------------------------------

New features

 - Use a new method for creating and caching the appliance.  This
   greatly improves the performance of libguestfs, often by a factor
   of x 4 to x 5.

 - Support for guest inspection (like virt-inspector) via the ordinary
   API and all language bindings.  'guestfish -i' option is as a side-
   effect much quicker.

 - virt-inspector and core inspection API can now detect guests running:
   Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS,
   Scientific Linux, Gentoo, Pardus, Arch Linux, MeeGo.

 - Support for LUKS whole-disk encryption in guests.

 - PHP bindings.

 - Progress messages (and progress bars in guestfish and virt-resize)
   for certain long-running operations.

 - virt-df is now much more efficient.  Use '--one-per-guest' to restore
   the old per-guest isolation behaviour.

 - guestfish 'copy-in' and 'copy-out' commands for copying files
and
   directories recursively in and out of the guest.

 - guestfish 'hexedit' command for doing binary edits to devices and
   files.

 - Change guestfish -i syntax to allow commands to be specified on the
   command line (retaining backwards compatibility).

 - guestfish '-d <domain>' for adding disks from libvirt domains.

 - guestfish '-N' option supports several new prepared disk image types:
         lvfs : disk with LV formatted with filesystem
           lv : disk with LV
     bootroot : boot+root
   bootrootlv : boot and root on LV

 - guestfish 'more' and 'edit' commands now work with arbitrary
files.

 - guestfish '--echo-keys' option allows you to echo keys/passphrases
   while typing them.

 - guestmount now supports -a / -d / -i options, like guestfish.

 - Use virtio-serial for communications with the appliance.  This
   also has a major performance benefit.

 - virt-edit '-b' option to create a backup of edited files.

 - virt-edit '-e' option for non-interactive edits to files.

 - Ability to capture core dumps from the appliance (thanks Matthew Booth).

 - virt-rescue now shuts down cleanly (thanks Matthew Booth).

 - virt-rescue now has a --network option to enable network access.

 - virt-resize can now handle guests which use GPT partition table format.

 - virt-resize has better support for shrinking guests.

 - virt-resize supports qcow2-format guests.

 - $TMPDIR can be used to override almost all temporary directory usage.

 - OCaml users can use an alternate OO-style of coding, eg. g#launch ()

 - The API supports calls which take optional parameters, eg.
     $g->add_drive_opts ("disk", readonly => 1);

 - Trace output now escapes and shortens large strings (thanks
   Matthew Booth).

 - Autosync is now on by default, resulting in more reliable behaviour
   when the handle is closed.

 - virt-df --uuid option allows you to follow a domain across migration
   and renaming.

 - Translations of manual pages.

Security

 - CVE-2010-3851 libguestfs: missing disk format specifier when adding a disk
   https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2010-October/msg00036.html
   This is comprehensively fixed in this release, and the fix will be
   backported to the other stable branches after more testing.

 - virt-inspector no longer relies on untrusted guest code to list
   applications in some guests.

New APIs

  download-offset, file-architecture, findfs-label, findfs-uuid,
  inspect-os, inspect-get-arch, inspect-get-distro,
  inspect-get-filesystems, inspect-get-major-version,
  inspect-get-minor-version, inspect-get-mountpoints,
  inspect-get-product-name, inspect-get-type, is-blockdev, is-chardev,
  is-fifo, is-lv, is-socket, is-symlink, list-filesystems, luks-add-key,
  luks-close, luks-format, luks-format-cipher, luks-kill-slot,
  luks-open, luks-open-ro, lvm-clear-filter, lvm-canonical-lv-name,
  lvm-set-filter, part-to-dev, pread-device, pwrite-device,
  upload-offset

Internals

 - Use size_t for loop iterators.
 - Refactor the library code into separate files.
 - Refactor the generator code into separate files.
 - Generate guestfish commands.
 - guestfish & guestmount options processing is unified.
 - Protocol changes:
     error message size increased to 64K
     send errno to library
 - Add 'make bindist' to make a binary distribution.
 - Cleaner behaviour under valgrind.
 - More testing of the guestfish command line options and libvirt
   integration.
 - The Perl inspection code is no longer used by any of the tools.

Bugs fixed

 - 646822 libguestfs trace mode should not print long binary strings
 - 646821 virt-df should have --uuid option
 - 646432 /dev/mapper paths should not be returned from guestfs_mountpoints
 - 643624 libguestfs tools documentation should describe how to quote guest
domain names from shell
 - 642934 No way to specify disk format when adding a disk to libguestfs
 - 642933 guestfs_list_filesystems should be used in all possible places
 - 642932 guestmount options should match guestfish options
 - 642930 virt-inspector (Sys::Guestfs::Lib) should use C inspection APIs
 - 642929 C inspection code should ignore /dev/fd* in /etc/fstab
 - 642826 virt-resize converts any other image format to raw without notifying
user, instructions do not account for this
 - 640961 Document that grub-install might be needed for old Linux guests after
virt-resize
 - 639986 virt-df --csv does not properly quote " in libvirt domain names
 - 639405 Interrupted cached appliance creation leaves libguestfs unusable
 - 638901 Appliance filename should not contain repository name
 - 638899 /dev/mapper paths should not be returned from C inspection APIs
 - 636918 Updates to Spanish translation
 - 636061 [abrt] guestfish-1.2.11-1.fc12: malloc_consolidate: Process
/usr/bin/guestfish was killed by signal 11 (SIGSEGV)
 - 635969 glob echo mkfs ext2 /dev/vd[b-t]1 prints garbage
 - 634246 guestfs_part_get_parttype returns "loop" when run against a
partition, LV or filesystem
 - 633766 virt-resize --shrink fails
 - 633357 Updates to Spanish translation
 - 633096 virt-resize calculates block device size incorrectly, doesn't work
with qcow2 target
 - 629593 Dutch translation added
 - 627556 Updates to Spanish translations of libguestfs
 - 626843 Updates to Spanish translations
 - 619793 [RFE] Need a way to determine if a particular block device is a
logical volume
 - 618556 virt-rescue return none zero value when exit
 - 617200 mount operation failed and hung on some images which running in
read-only mode
 - 610880 libguestfs should set broader read perms on tmpdir, so works in some
situations when executed with umask 077
 - 599503 document that mkmountpoint and umount-all cannot be mixed
 - 571714 Running virt-df on disk image relabels it, so qemu can no longer write
to it.
 - 502533 Updated Polish translation of libguestfs


-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
Fedora now supports 80 OCaml packages (the OPEN alternative to F#)
http://cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_red_hat_and_fedora