Libguestfs - Mar 2014 - virt-builder disk space

Hi,

I've got a feature request, it would be nice to have some friendly info in
the case you don't have enough disk space on the default locations for
virt-builder and supermin to run.

I was using virt-builder on the official Fedora AMI on EC2 which includes an
awesome 2G root block device and, since RAM is at a premium in the smaller
instance types, tmpfs is not used.
http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-options#clouds

However, EC2 also includes direct-attached "Instance Storage" scratch
space such as 160G magnetic on m1.small or 32G ssd on m3.large (details at
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ ) which cloud-init automatically mounts at
/mnt. 

All you get output wise is :

virt-builder: libguestfs error: /usr/bin/supermin-helper exited with error
status 1.

Even with LIBGUESTFS_DEBUG and LIBGUESTFS_TRACE supermin isn't super helpful
but you can see lines such as:
libguestfs: trace: get_cachedir = "/var/tmp"
/usr/bin/supermin-helper: ext2fs_read_inode: Illegal inode number

This works fine:

export TMPDIR=/mnt
virt-builder --cache /mnt fedora-20


More output attached. I love virt-builder btw.

On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 06:49:26AM -0700, Joshua Daniel Franklin
wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've got a feature request, it would be nice to have some friendly info
in the case you don't have enough disk space on the default locations for
virt-builder and supermin to run.
> 
> I was using virt-builder on the official Fedora AMI on EC2 which includes
an awesome 2G root block device and, since RAM is at a premium in the smaller
instance types, tmpfs is not used.
> http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-options#clouds
> 
> However, EC2 also includes direct-attached "Instance Storage"
scratch space such as 160G magnetic on m1.small or 32G ssd on m3.large (details
at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ ) which cloud-init automatically mounts at
/mnt. 
> 
> All you get output wise is :
> 
> virt-builder: libguestfs error: /usr/bin/supermin-helper exited with error
status 1.
> 
> Even with LIBGUESTFS_DEBUG and LIBGUESTFS_TRACE supermin isn't super
helpful but you can see lines such as:
> libguestfs: trace: get_cachedir = "/var/tmp"
> /usr/bin/supermin-helper: ext2fs_read_inode: Illegal inode number
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/libguestfs
This is a real bug in supermin.  I have filed it:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1074584

Since we have just heavily updated supermin, this would be a good
time to fix this problem.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows programs, test, and
build Windows installers. Over 100 libraries supported.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW