Libguestfs - Dec 2012 - Release notes appendix for libguestfs 1.20 on Debian Wheezy

I'm just about to release libguestfs 1.20.  I want to cover some
things that are different or won't work as well in Debian Wheezy.

** Most important ** Debian Wheezy ships with febootstrap 3.17.  This
is too old to run libguestfs 1.20 out of the box (febootstrap >= 3.20
required).  However if you apply the attached patch to libguestfs,
then it will work with the older febootstrap.

virtio-scsi is not working properly in the older version of qemu that
Debian Wheezy ships (qemu 1.1 is shipped, qemu >= 1.2 is required).
For this reason I have added code to libguestfs which detects if you
have qemu < 1.2 and forces virtio-blk.  Unfortunately this means you
don't get the benefits of virtio-scsi (see the main release notes).

Because of lack of virtio-scsi and too old libvirt (libvirt 0.9.12 is
shipped, libvirt >= 0.10.2 is required), the new libvirt attach-method
will not work in Debian.  See the release notes for what you'll miss
out on.  Of course the default (appliance) method works fine, and
libvirt is not required.

Even if newer libvirt and qemu where available in Debian, it seems
unlikely that sVirt protection would work.  This is partly because of
the obvious fact that Debian doesn't use SELinux (by default).  But
mainly because we have made several changes to the SELinux policy in
Fedora to support libguestfs with libvirt and sVirt.  Also, although
in theory AppArmor could implement sVirt (there is code in libvirt to
do this) I have not even come close to testing this scenario.

The tune2fs test is broken (in libguestfs).  The easiest thing is just
to skip it:
  export SKIP_TEST_TUNE2FS=1

'vfat' filesystem on Debian is somehow different from the same kernel
filesystem on Fedora.  I don't exactly know why but this breaks the
test-charset-fidelity test.  You can skip this by doing:
  export SKIP_TEST_CHARSET_FIDELITY=1

The IDE device either isn't emulated by Debian's KVM, or there is a
missing driver in the Debian kernel, or for some other reason it
doesn't work.  I didn't look closely, but skipped the test by doing:
  export SKIP_TEST_RHBZ690819_SH=1

Disk labels (a new feature) don't work with Debian udev.  Again, I did
not investigate in depth.  You can skip the test by doing:
  export SKIP_TEST_DISK_LABELS_PL=1

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines.  Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v
-------------- next part --------------
>From 7f7c180e69cc9867bd2309d38e1c1ba6caf14fdf Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: "Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones at redhat.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2012 18:33:33 +0000
Subject: [PATCH] DEBIAN 7: REVERT 3ed3e23ed (NO FEBOOTSTRAP COPY-KERNEL
 OPTION).

---
 src/appliance.c | 5 ++---
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/src/appliance.c b/src/appliance.c
index e7ba60d..7f7743b 100644
--- a/src/appliance.c
+++ b/src/appliance.c
@@ -102,7 +102,7 @@ gl_lock_define_initialized (static, building_lock);
  * $TMPDIR/.guestfs-$UID/ and consists of four files:
  *
  *   $TMPDIR/.guestfs-$UID/checksum       - the checksum
- *   $TMPDIR/.guestfs-$UID/kernel         - the kernel
+ *   $TMPDIR/.guestfs-$UID/kernel         - symlink to the kernel
  *   $TMPDIR/.guestfs-$UID/initrd         - the febootstrap initrd
  *   $TMPDIR/.guestfs-$UID/root           - the appliance
  *
@@ -643,7 +643,7 @@ hard_link_to_cached_appliance (guestfs_h *g,
     perrorf (g, "link: %s %s", filename, *kernel);
     goto error;
   }
-  (void) utimes (filename, NULL);
+  (void) lutimes (filename, NULL); /* lutimes because it's a symlink */
 
   snprintf (filename, len, "%s/initrd", cachedir);
   (void) unlink (*initrd);
@@ -695,7 +695,6 @@ run_supermin_helper (guestfs_h *g, const char
*supermin_path,
     guestfs___cmd_add_arg (cmd, "-g");
     guestfs___cmd_add_arg_format (cmd, "%d", egid);
   }
-  guestfs___cmd_add_arg (cmd, "--copy-kernel");
   guestfs___cmd_add_arg (cmd, "-f");
   guestfs___cmd_add_arg (cmd, "ext2");
   guestfs___cmd_add_arg_format (cmd, "%s/supermin.d", supermin_path);
-- 
1.8.0.1