Some features removed¶

The following little used, experimental or unsafe features have been removed:

"Libguestfs live" was an experimental feature that allowed you (in theory) to connect to an existing instance of the libguestfs daemon in a running guest. If you want to do this we recommend installing qemu-guest-agent in the guest instead and using the APIs provided by it. The related "unix:" backend has been removed. The guestfish(1) and guestmount(1) --live option now prints an error.

The User-mode Linux ("uml") backend has been removed. It was an alternate hypervisor that could be used instead of qemu. It had many limitations including lack of network support, and lack of qemu native features like qcow2 or network-backed disks. In addition it was slower than KVM and particular features like bulk upload/download were painfully slow. Also the UML feature of Linux that it was based on often does not work.

The 9pfs APIs "guestfs_list_9p" and "guestfs_mount_9p" have been deprecated and now return errors. This was related to an experimental feature for passing through host filesystems to the appliance. You had to hand-hack the qemu command line for this to work and it did not fit the libguestfs model very well.

"guestfs_add_drive" no longer supports hotplugging (adding a drive after launch), and "guestfs_remove_drive" has been deprecated and now returns an error. Hotplugging was an unsuccessful feature which was complicated to implement and maintain, and was slow and insecure. It also only worked with the non-default libvirt backend, and was never implemented in the default "direct" backend.

Language bindings¶

Fix allocation and deallocation of string lists in golang bindings (Laszlo Ersek).

Multiple fixes to the OCaml bindings: Fix warnings, move minimum version to OCaml 4.04, replace various deprecated OCaml features with modern OCaml features.

Running "make distclean" in the rust directory now completely cleans the cargo temporary files.

Inspection¶

Fix inspection of modern Pardus GNU/Linux (Laszlo Ersek).

Add support for Kylin (Laszlo Ersek).

Add support for Rocky Linux (Neil Hanlon).

Inspection of guests which use LUKS encryption on top of LVM logical volumes should now work (Laszlo Ersek).

API¶

New APIs

No new APIs were added in libguestfs 1.48.

Other API changes

"guestfs_list_9p" and "guestfs_mount_9p" are deprecated and now return errors.

"guestfs_remove_drive" has been deprecated and now returns an error.

In "guestfs_xfs_admin" the "lazycounter" parameter is deprecated because it is no longer supported in recent versions of XFS.

Partition APIs now cope with the broken MBR partition tables created by dosfstools ≥ 4.2 (Laszlo Ersek).

In "guestfs_md_create" the "chunk" parameter should not be used with RAID 1. Previously it was allowed but ignored, but now it will give an error (Laszlo Ersek).

Build changes¶

Multiple compiler warnings fixed and/or analyzed and suppressed (Laszlo Ersek).

Fix detection of optional Yara library using pkg-config instead of checking for library/header file (Laszlo Ersek).

Update valgrind suppressions for glibc 2.35, OCaml 4.13 and libvirt 7.7. "make check-valgrind" works again.

If using libvirt ≥ 3.8.0, we now use <interface> to create the appliance network interface instead of adding qemu command line parameters (Laszlo Ersek).

The guestfs-release-notes(1) page was a broken link, but it has now been restored as a new page that links to the release notes from each stable release.

Internals¶

The libc API strerror_r(3) is difficult to use correctly because of differing signatures in glibc and other libc. A wrapper "guestfs_int_strerror" has been created to hide the differences.

Bugs fixed¶

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/2030709

[RFE] libguestfs: Add Rocky Linux support

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/2030396

Fix usage of strerror_r which caused corrupted error messages

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/2024022

xfs-admin: Cannot disable lazy-counters on V5 fs

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1995391

RFE: virt-inspector fails to detect the distro and applications on Kylin-Desktop-V10 image

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1993842

RFE: virt-inspector fails to detect the distro on Pardus-19.5 image

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1931821

work around mkfs.vfat writes corrupted filesystem/partition table when used on whole block device

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1451665

RFE: Virt-v2v can't convert the guest which has encrypted partition