New features¶

New features in existing tools

Virt-inspector now displays the libosinfo short ID for guests (Pino Toscano).

Guestfish -N will now generate 1G disks instead of 100M disks by default.

Virt-resize supports f2fs filesystems (Pino Toscano).

libguestfs-test-tool now supports bash tab completion (Pino Toscano).

The --machine-readable option now supports sending output to files or stdout/stderr. This works uniformly across most OCaml-based virt tools, specifically: virt-builder, virt-builder-repository, virt-dib, virt-get-kernel, virt-resize, virt-sparsify, and virt-v2v (Pino Toscano).

Virt-builder --uninstall option now works on SUSE (Sebastian Meyer).

Virt-builder now supports Windows. We are not able to ship Windows templates in the public respository for obvious licensing reasons, but if you are an MSDN subscriber you may build your own. See https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/09/13/creating-windows-templates-for-virt-builder/

Many tools now support a --key option allowing you to pass in decryption keys for filesystems stored in local files on the host rather than having to feed them in over stdin (Pino Toscano).

virt-v2v and virt-p2v

New -o rhv-upload mode for directly uploading images to RHV, bypassing the Export Storage Domain (Tomáš Golembiovský, Nir Soffer, Daniel Erez, Pino Toscano).

New -o openstack mode for directly uploading images to OpenStack and Cinder using OpenStack APIs.

Virt-v2v now has a general mechanism for input and output options: -io and -oo.

Virt-v2v can now install the RHV tools or QEMU GA in guests (Tomáš Golembiovský).

The huge manual has now been split into several smaller documents and is more focused on helping users to accomplish specific v2v tasks.

Multiple improvements to the OVF metadata when converting to RHV (Tomáš Golembiovský, Pino Toscano, Arik Hadas).

Virt-v2v can now convert Linux guests with split kernel packages, especially Ubuntu 18.04 (Pino Toscano).

Virt-v2v old --password-file option has been replaced by -ip (the old option remains for backwards compatibility).

Virt-v2v now preserves the VM Generation ID.

Virt-v2v has a new --mac option allowing specific NICs to be mapped precisely to networks or bridges on the target.

New virt-v2v --print-estimate option to estimate the size of data that virt-v2v will copy.

Virt-v2v is now usually able to remove open-vm-tools and VMware Tools from the Linux guest during conversion (Pino Toscano).

Virt-v2v can now support UEFI conversions to RHV (Tomáš Golembiovský).

Virt-p2v now prefers you to shut down instead of rebooting the machine after conversion has finished (Pino Toscano).

Virt-v2v now writes the libosinfo short ID to the libvirt metadata when using -o local and -o libvirt output modes (Martin Kletzander).

Language bindings

OpenJDK 10+ is supported (Pino Toscano).

Java bindings fixed for Gentoo host (Martin Kletzander).

Inspection

Support Kali Linux (Pino Toscano).

When inspecting mountpoints, look for /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf as well as /etc/mdadm.conf (Nikolay Ivanets).

Improved support for OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (Pino Toscano).

Architectures and platforms

Miscellaneous macOS build fixes (Adam Robinson).

Other

Multiple documentation typos fixed (Yuri Chornoivan).

Security¶

See also guestfs-security(1).

CVE-2018-11806

Qemu's slirp (userspace networking) had several buffer overflows which could be triggered from the guest or network side.

API¶

New APIs

"f2fs_expand"

Expand an f2fs filesystem (Pino Toscano).

"inspect_get_osinfo"

Get the libosinfo short ID for the inspected guest (Pino Toscano).

"lvm_scan"

This rescans all PVs, VGs and LVs, optionally activating them.

Other API changes

"part_get_mbr_part_type" was reimplemented in OCaml (Nikolay Ivanets).

"list_filesystems" now filters out MBR extended partitions (Nikolay Ivanets).

"vgscan" has been deprecated. Use the new "lvm_scan" API in preference.

Build changes¶

The JSON library switched from yajl to Jansson ≥ 2.7 (Pino Toscano).

Support for The Sleuth Kit 4.5 (Pino Toscano).

Multiple improvements in the "./configure" script (Lin Ma).

More out-of-tree build fixes (Hilko Bengen).

Some work on reproducible builds (Bernhard M. Wiedemann).

Internals¶

lvmetad is now used unconditionally, and is started much earlier in the appliance boot process. This fixes support for certain PV types.

On Debian, dash is installed inside the appliance and in virt-rescue (Pino Toscano).

The amount of RAM assigned to the appliance has been increased from 500M to 768M (on x86_64, other architectures have different limits). This enables use of up to 255 disks when using recent Linux kernels.

Virt-v2v now models the source machine type (eg. i440FX, Q35 or virt).

Virt-p2v now generates configuration code automatically, also code for parsing the kernel command line.

Use "LT_INIT" instead of "AC_PROG_LIBTOOL".

The OCaml "JSON" code for parsing and serializing has been unified into a single abstract data type.

Most OCaml tools are now built using the PIC runtime. This has a performance penalty on i686, but is relatively free on other architectures and has security benefits.

The direct backend now queries the qemu binary for availability of KVM, instead of using a heuristic based on /dev/kvm (Andrea Bolognani).

Our "clever" libxml2 writer macros are now used consistently across all parts of the code base.

Qemu dropped -nodefconfig without telling us. The equivalent -no-user-config option is now used instead. Qemu also moved the "serial" option from -drive to -device, again without any notice, and this is also fixed.

Bugs fixed¶

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1664310

[RHEL 7.6 LP] openstack output leaks passwords

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1661038

virt-inspector fails with "error: int_of_string" on a Linux image when /etc/fstab contains a partionless device

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1651432

v2v - support for -insecure option to support OSP SSL connection for VM migrations

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1642044

[RFE] virt-p2v UI should give the option to shutdown after conversion is finished

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1634248

virt-v2v cannot convert opensuse15 guest

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1624902

Fix rhev-apt command that virt-v2v runs in Windows guests on first boot

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1624878

Update v2v docs to describe support for SHA 2 certs required for converting Windows 7 and 2008 R2 guests

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1615885

Minor log issue of virt-v2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1614276

VixDiskLib: VixDiskLib_Read: Read 4096 sectors at 57516160 failed. Error 2 (Memory allocation failed. Out of memory.) (DiskLib error 802: NBD_ERR_INSUFFICIENT_RESOURCES) at 5240.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1612785

"warning: <target dev='sr0'> was ignored because the device name could not be recognized" should be hidden since convert cdrom is supported by virt-v2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1611690

part_to_dev "/dev/sdp1" returns "/dev/sd" instead of "/dev/sdp"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1608131

inspection fails when swap partition in /etc/fstab has incorrect UUID compared to actual swap partition

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1605071

On machines where /dev/kvm exists but KVM doesn't work, libguestfs will not fall back to TCG

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1602353

virt-inspector can't inspect LUKS-encrypted RHEL7 guest image

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1601943

Improve error "No module named ovirtsdk4" in v2v rhv-upload conversion

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1598715

Adding QXL device in OVF causes Cirrus Logic device to be added to guest

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1598350

RFE: virt-v2v should preserve <genid>

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1596851

Transfer fails if local host is in maintenance mode

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1596810

Transfer fails if local host belongs to another DC

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1592468

v2v to RHV transfer fails with: error: [empty name]: cannot read '//*/disksection' with value: null

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1592061

virt-v2v convert rhel5.3 failure when executing rpm -ql kernel-2.6.18-128.el5 command

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1591789

p2v: error: XML error: CPU vendor specified without CPU model

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1590220

Hide rhv-upload option in virt-p2v client

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1588451

Don't use relative socket paths for NBD

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1588088

RFE: Support for -o rhv-upload via Unix domain socket

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1586198

ovirt-imageio-daemon times out during migration

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1580309

virt-v2v rhel7.6 build can't convert guest to null with qemu-kvm rhel7.5.z build

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1580292

Virt-v2v rhel7.6 build can't convert guest with qemu-kvm rhel7.5.z build

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1579047

virt-builder: ubuntu-18.04 template has stray HTTP proxy configured for apt

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1575640

virt-builder: error: host cpu (x86_64) and guest arch (unknown) are not compatible

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1570407

virt-v2v -i ova gives checksum error when missing files are mentioned in .mf

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1567763

guestfsd: error: /Windows/Drivers/VirtIO: Read-only file system

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1564983

The mount-vfs failed to mount the logical volume

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1561828

RHV tools not properly installed in migrated Windows VM's causing boot failure

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1559027

virt-v2v does not honor --network with -o rhv-upload

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1557273

[RFE] Upload images directly to oVirt (virt-v2v -o rhv-upload)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1544842

[RFE] Add libosinfo short-id to virt-inspector output

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1544674

virt-inspector --help differs from manpage

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1544227

RFE: recognize the Kali Linux distribution

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1532224

Resume=/dev/sdaX can't be updated to resume=/dev/vdaX in rhel7 guest's grub file after v2v conversion

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1530967

Change categories of "Guest Operating system management by VIX API" in v2v man page

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1527334

Various -it vddk -io vddk* options should be documented, removed or fixed

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1148012

Reverted: RFE: Allow qemu-bridge-helper to be used to implement guestfs_set_network

New features¶

New tools

Virt-builder-repository is a new tool allowing end users to create and update virt-builder repositories (Cédric Bosdonnat).

Virt-rescue (while not a new tool) has been substantially rewritten, implementing job control, -m and -i options, escape keys, etc.

New features in existing tools

Virt-builder planner has been improved so that faster and more efficient build plans are chosen for complex cases, especially when either the tmpdir or output is on networked storage.

New virt-builder Fedora templates (starting with Fedora 26) will have plain partition layout and use GPT for partitions.

Virt-customize "firstboot" scripts in guests using systemd are now installed under the "multi-user.target" instead of "default.target" so they will only run when the system is booted normally.

Virt-customize now sets a random /etc/machine-id for Linux guests, if one is not already set.

Virt-df now works correctly on filesystems with block sizes smaller than 1K (Nikolay Ivanets).

Virt-dib has further compatibility enhancements with diskimage-builder (Pino Toscano).

Virt-sysprep removes "DHCP_HOSTNAME" from ifcfg-* files.

Virt-sysprep now works on Oracle Linux (Jamie Iles).

Virt-resize now correctly copies GPT partition attributes from the source to the destination (Cédric Bosdonnat).

Bash tab completion implemented or enhanced for: virt-win-reg, virt-v2v-copy-to-local.

virt-v2v and virt-p2v

Virt-v2v can now read VMware VMX files directly, either from local disk, NFS storage, or over SSH from an ESXi hypervisor.

Virt-v2v can now use VDDK as an input source.

Both virt-v2v and virt-p2v are now able to pass through the source CPU vendor, model and topology. However unfortunately not all source and target hypervisors are able to provide or consume this data at present (Tomáš Golembiovský).

Virt-v2v now supports encrypted guests (Pino Toscano).

Virt-v2v can now handle VMware snapshots. Note that the snapshots are collapsed — it does not convert the chain of snapshots into a chain of snapshots.

Virt-v2v now installs Windows 10 / Windows Server 2016 virtio block drivers correctly (Pavel Butsykin, Kun Wei).

Virt-v2v now installs virtio-rng, balloon and pvpanic drivers, and correctly sets this in the target hypervisor metadata for hypervisors which support that (Tomáš Golembiovský).

Virt-v2v now installs both legacy and modern virtio keys in the Windows registry (Ladi Prosek).

Virt-p2v can now preserve (in some cases) the offset of the Real Time Clock from UTC.

Virt-p2v now combines several scp commands to the conversion server into a single command, improving conversion times.

Virt-v2v now detects the special Linux Xen PV-only kernels correctly (Laszlo Ersek).

Virt-v2v -o glance now generates the right properties for UEFI guests (Pino Toscano).

Virt-v2v -o null now avoids spooling the guest to a temporary file, instead it writes to the qemu "null block device". This makes it faster and use almost no disk space.

Virt-v2v -o rhv now supports Windows 2016 Server guest type.

Virt-v2v -i libvirtxml can now open network disks over http or https.

Virt-v2v will now give a warning about host passthrough devices (Pino Toscano).

The virt-v2v --machine-readable output has been enhanced so it includes "vcenter-https", "xen-ssh" and "in-place" facts (Pino Toscano).

Language bindings

Fix multiple memory leaks and other data corruption problems in the Java bindings (Pino Toscano).

Perl %guestfs_introspection has been dropped.

Inspection

Inspection support was rewritten in OCaml and included inside the daemon. This makes inspection considerably faster, more robust and more easily extensible in future.

Better icon support for ALT Linux guests (Pino Toscano).

Better support for NeoKylin (Qingzheng Zhang).

Can handle OSes like Void Linux which do not include "VERSION_ID" in /etc/os-release (Pino Toscano).

Add support for Microsoft MS-DOS (Daniel Berrangé).

Architectures and platforms

Multiple fixes for S/390 architecture. Libguestfs and all the tools should now compile and run on this architecture.

Other

The libguestfs API is now thread-safe (although not parallel). You can call APIs on the same handle from multiple threads without needing to take a lock.

Security¶

There were multiple vulnerabilities in the icoutils "wrestool" program which is run by libguestfs to create icons for Windows guests. Using the latest "wrestool" is recommended.

API¶

New APIs

"hivex_value_string"

This replaces the deprecated "hivex_value_utf8" API, but does the same thing.

"part_get_gpt_attributes"

"part_set_gpt_attributes"

Read and write GPT partition attribute flags (Cédric Bosdonnat).

"part_resize"

Enlarge or shrink an existing partition (Nikos Skalkotos).

"yara_destroy"

"yara_load"

"yara_scan"

Support for the Yara malware scanning engine (Matteo Cafasso).

Other API changes

APIs implemented in the daemon can now be written in either C or OCaml. Several APIs were rewritten in OCaml, although we are not planning to rewrite all of them.

You will now get a clear error message if you try to add too many disks to the appliance, instead of getting a peculiar failure from qemu.

Certain APIs accidentally allowed you to use "/dev/urandom" as an input "device", eg. "g.copy_device_to_device("/dev/urandom", "/dev/sda")". The code has been modified to forbid this usage.

All APIs for inspecting installer CDs have been deprecated. Use libosinfo for this task.

Build changes¶

A working OCaml compiler ≥ 4.01 is now required for building libguestfs. The "./configure --disable-ocaml" option remains but is only used to disable the OCaml language bindings.

Add "RELEASES" file which lists release dates for each version of libguestfs. You must update this file when making a new release.

Documentation generated by "gtk-doc" has been removed. "./configure --enable-gtk-doc" now does nothing.

Libtirpc is now used for XDR functions and rpcgen. Note that glibc has deprecated and in most Linux distros dropped these, so for most people this will be an extra dependency (Martin Kletzander).

Libxcrypt is now used for crypt(3). This is required if using glibc ≥ 2.27.

"ocaml-hivex" is now required.

Libvirt ≥ 1.2.20 is now required.

There is now a "make check-root" target for tests which need to be run as root (analogous to "make check-slow").

"./configure"-time check for "__attribute__((cleanup))" now works in the cross-compilation case (Yann E. Morin).

The "AUTHORS" and "p2v/about-authors.c" files are now generated from a single place.

Either GnuPG v1 or v2 can be used.

"./configure --with-guestfs-path" may be used to set the default "LIBGUESTFS_PATH". In addition the way that the path is searched has changed slightly so that all types of appliances are searched in each path element separately (Pavel Butsykin).

"GUESTFSD_EXT_CMD" which was used to mark external commands in the daemon has been removed. It was originally used by SUSE builds, but they have not been using it for a while.

The output from "./configure" is now visually grouped under headings related to what it is doing, making it much easier to scan (Pino Toscano).

OCaml dependencies are now generated from a single script instead of multiple not-quite-the-same Makefile fragments.

"./configure --with-distro=ID" can be used to override automatic Linux distro detection at build time (Pino Toscano).

qemu ≥ 2.10 is supported (but not required). This adds mandatory locking to disks and libguestfs turns this off in certain circumstances when it is known to be safe (Lars Seipel, Peter Krempa, Daniel Berrangé, Pino Toscano, Fam Zheng, Yongkui Guo, Václav Kadlčík).

Internals¶

Most common code has been moved to the common/ subdirectory, with OCaml common code being in common/ml* directories (eg. common/visit and common/mlvisit contain the visitor library in C and OCaml respectively). The mllib directory has been deleted and replaced by common/mltools.

There is now a lightweight OCaml binding for PCRE, see common/mlpcre. Use of OCaml "Str" library has been mostly replaced with PCRE.

Add more calls to "udev_settle" to improve stability of partition code (Dawid Zamirski).

Run "udev_settle" with --exit-if-exists option, which improves the speed of this command (Pavel Butsykin).

Detect new locations of major(3), minor(3), makedev(3).

Actions can now be deprecated with no suggested replacement, for APIs such as "guestfs_wait_ready" that should simply be removed from client code.

Use gnulib "set_nonblocking_flag" wrapper instead of calling fcntl(2) with "O_NONBLOCK" (Eric Blake). Similarly "set_cloexec_flag".

Fix memory leak in XFS version of "guestfs_vfs_minimum_size" (Pino Toscano).

Valgrind checks now run on the virt-p2v binary.

Unicode single quotes ("‘’") and now used in place of '' or `' throughout the code and documentation. Similarly for "’s" instead of "'s".

The "is_zero" function has been reimplemented for greater speed (Eric Blake).

In the direct backend, virtio-blk support has been removed. Virtio-scsi is now the only supported way to add disks.

Generator string parameter and return types have been rationalised so there are only two types ("String", "StringList") with many subtypes eg. "FileIn" becomes "String (FileIn, ...)".

The appliance disk image can now be in formats other than raw (Pavel Butsykin).

Multiple improvements to how we automatically build Debian templates for virt-builder (Pino Toscano). Enable serial console for these templates (Florian Klink).

In the daemon, instead of making a private copy of lvm.conf and modifying it (eg for filters), start with an empty file since LVM understands that to mean "all defaults" (Alasdair Kergon, Zdenek Kabelac).

The "direct" backend can now run QMP queries against the QEMU binary, enhancing the kinds of information we can detect. In addition the code to query QEMU has been made more robust for handling multiple parallel queries of different versions of QEMU.

OCaml Augeas bindings are bundled under common/mlaugeas. The long term plan is to remove this and use system ocaml-augeas when it is more widely available in distros (Pino Toscano).

All OCaml modules ("*.ml" files) are now required to have an interface file ("*.mli"). If they don't export anything then the interface will be empty except for comments.

Certain OCaml features in OCaml ≥ 4.01 are used throughout the code, including replacing ‘{ field = field }’ with ‘{ field }’.

Virt-builder "make-template" utility now uses the "virt-install --transient" option so that we should never need to clean up left over domains after a crash. It also saves kickstarts and virt-install commands, which are committed to git for future reference.

/dev/shm is now created in the appliance (Nicolas Hicher).

In verbose mode on Fedora guests, virt-customize will now use "dnf --verbose" enabling better debugging output.

Virt-v2v input and output classes now contain a "#precheck" method which is used to perform environmental checks before conversion starts.

Virt-p2v enables miniexpect debugging. It is written to stderr (of virt-p2v).

Virt-v2v free space checks are more liberal especially for smaller guests (Pino Toscano).

Bugs fixed¶

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1540535

Example URI of "Convert from ESXi hypervisor over SSH to local libvirt" is incorrect in v2v man page

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1539395

virt-customize segfaults after upgrading to 1.37.35-3

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1536765

Libguestfs Perl bindings can leak a small amount of memory on error

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1536763

libguestfs Lua bindings use strerror(), which isn’t thread safe

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1536603

man page makes no mention of using '--' when trying to change exit on error behavior

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1525241

virt-df displays zeros for filesystems with block size =512

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1519204

v2v should improve the result when convert a rhel7.4 guest with no available kernels found in the bootloader

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1518517

virt-v2v fails with "unsupported configuration: shared access for disk 'sdb' requires use of supported storage format"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1516094

Mere presence of QEMU file locking options breaks NBD (Block protocol 'nbd' doesn't support the option 'locking')

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1514756

./configure --disable-ocaml breaks building common/mlpcre which breaks building daemon

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1513884

[RFE]Should update some vddk info in v2v man page

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1508874

virt-v2v: warning: ova disk has an unknown VMware controller type (20)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1506572

virt-v2v '-i ova' is not parsing the MAC address from the source OVF

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1506511

virt-builder fails to parse repo file if it has blank space after the repository identifier

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1503958

Failed to convert the rhel5 guest with kmod-xenpv installed from xen server by virt-v2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1503497

qemu-kvm fails to open qcow2 files in read-only mode with qemu-kvm 1.5.3

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1500673

Error info shows wrong sometimes when ssh to conversion server using non-root user with sudo on p2v client

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1500537

/dev/shm does not exist in the appliance environment

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1497475

guestfish cannot list commands from interactive mode

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1493048

Unbound constructor Hivex.OPEN_UNSAFE

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1484957

bump debian images to use single-partition layout

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1482737

virt-resize failed to expand swap partition for RHEL5.11 guest image with "parsing UUID failed"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1477623

Running file API on a special chardev may hang forever

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1476081

inspect-os report error: could not parse integer in version number: V7Update2

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1472719

[RFE]Add warning in process of v2v converting guest which has pci passthrough device

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1472208

virt-v2v fails on opensuse 13.2 guest with error: statns: statns_stub: path must start with a / character

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1469655

firstboot scripts are not correctly installed in Fedora 26

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1466563

Libguestfs should pass copyonread flag through to the libvirt XML

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1465665

1.36.x build failure: gtkdocize fails using newer autotools due to missing GTK_DOC_CHECK in configure.ac

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1460338

guestfs_shutdown hangs if main process sets signal handlers

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1459979

guestfs_add_domain_argv fails with readonly option when vdi/vhd disk is attached to libvirt domain

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1451665

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

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1450325

document URI format for -a parameters of tools

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1448739

RFE: Support multicore decompression for OVA files using pigz and pxz

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1447202

Win 2016 guest is described as Win 10 after imported to RHEVM

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1441197

RFE: ability to convert VMware virtual machines via vmx

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1438939

Please drop or update GnuPG (1.4.x) dependency

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1438794

[RFE] Install Windows virtio-rng drivers on VMs imported

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1433937

virt-inspector can't get icon info from altlinux-centaurus

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1433577

policycoreutils setfiles >= 2.6 does .. nothing

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1431579

Windows 8 UEFI from VMware to KVM fails to boot after conversion

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1430680

There is error info about "No such file or directory" when convert a guest from ova file by v2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1430184

virt-dib should generate sha256 checksum instead of sha512

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1429506

RFE: OVMF should be detected on conversion server to prevent failed conversion

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1429491

Should rename network name of rhv in virt-v2v man page

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1427529

virt-sysprep should remove DHCP_HOSTNAME

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1417306

QEMU image file locking (libguestfs)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1409024

[Debian] Missing db_dump abort inspection

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1406906

Segmentation fault when reading corrupted path with Python 3 bindings

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1379289

RFE: virt-p2v should support mnemonic operations

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1378022

There is virt-v2v warning about <listen type='none'> during converting a guest which has listen type='none' in XML

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1376547

qemu-system-s390x: -device isa-serial,chardev=charserial0,id=serial0: 'isa-serial' is not a valid device model name

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1374232

selinux relabel fails on RHEL 6.2 guests with "libguestfs error: selinux_relabel: : Success"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1367738

Missing bash completion scripts for: virt-diff guestunmount virt-copy-in virt-copy-out virt-customize virt-get-kernel virt-p2v-make-disk virt-p2v-make-kickstart virt-tar-in virt-tar-out virt-v2v-copy-to-local virt-win-reg

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1362649

RFE: virt-sysprep does not utilize libguestfs encryption support

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1172425

[RFE]virt-v2v failed to convert VMware ESX VM with snapshot

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1171654

Modify a file in virt-rescue with vi on some linux terminal such as yakuake, can lead to abnormal display in virt-rescue shell

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1167623

Remove "If reporting bugs, run virt-v2v with debugging enabled .." message when running virt-p2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1152819

Can not end a running command in virt-rescue by press ^C or other keys, the only way is to exit virt-rescue

New features¶

New tools

Virt-tail is a new tool for following (tailing) log files within a guest, similar to the regular "tail -f" command.

New features in existing tools

Virt-customize, virt-get-kernel, virt-sparsify and virt-sysprep can now handle encrypted guests (Pino Toscano).

Virt-builder and virt-customize now support --append-line, which is useful for adding lines to the end of configuration files.

Virt-resize can now shrink and expand swap partitions (Pino Toscano).

Virt-resize can now output to non-local disks (Pino Toscano).

Virt-sysprep has a new operation called "backup-files" for removing editor backups, and "passwd-backups" for removing /etc/passwd- and similar.

Virt-dib can now create checksums using the new --checksum option (Pino Toscano).

Virt-dib can now create tgz files. In addition, extended attributes and SELinux labels are preserved in the output tar file (Pino Toscano).

Virt-dib can now create squashfs files (Pino Toscano).

Bash tab-completion is now available in every command line tool that is shipped.

virt-v2v and virt-p2v

Conversions of Debian (6+) and Ubuntu (10.04+) guests are now supported (Tomáš Golembiovský, Pino Toscano).

Conversions from SUSE Xen hypervisor have now been tested (Cédric Bosdonnat).

Windows conversions may now install a program "pnp_wait.exe" which prevents conflicts between the Windows Plug-and-Play Manager and our own scripts that install virtio device drivers. Enabling this requires the "pnp_wait.exe" program to be built separately (Roman Kagan).

OVA files exported from AWS can now be converted (Shahar Havivi).

When converting OVA files, in some circumstances virt-v2v can now read disk images directly from the OVA input file instead of needing to unpack the OVA file to a temporary directory. This can save large amounts of disk space, and is quicker (Tomáš Golembiovský).

Virt-p2v can now be built on RHEL 5 (2007-era) Linux and RHEL 6, which means that 32 bit and hardware with ancient fakeraid disks can be virtualized. Binaries of virt-p2v based on these old versions of RHEL can be found at http://oirase.annexia.org/virt-p2v/

Virt-p2v can now use nbdkit (an NBD server) as an alternative to qemu-nbd. In addition, virt-p2v can use "socket activation" which is a more robust method for opening the NBD listening socket. Socket activation works with qemu-nbd or nbdkit, but requires the most up to date versions.

To prevent timeouts during P2V conversions, virt-p2v inhibits power saving on the physical machine, and also sends ping packets over the ssh control and data connections.

Virt-v2v no longer removes the "Processor" and "Intelppm" nodes from the Windows Registry.

Xen and vCenter conversions can now be done using the libvirt backend, provided libvirt ≥ 2.1.0 is used.

/dev/srX (SCSI CD-ROM) devices are ignored (Tomáš Golembiovský).

When converting SUSE Linux guests, use /etc/modprobe.conf.local if it exists.

Removing VMware tools from Linux guests should now work reliably (Pino Toscano).

When converting OVA files, virt-v2v now checks the disk image hash contained in the manifest file, whereas previously it was ignored because of a mistake in the code. In addition, SHA256 hashes are now supported (Tomáš Golembiovský).

When converting OVA files that contain compressed disk images, we now trust the "ovf:compression" attribute from the metadata instead of using content sniffing on the disk image (Tomáš Golembiovský).

A new flag --vdsm-compat has been added to -o vdsm mode, allowing more efficient qcow2 images to be generated.

Since the RHEV product [commercially supported version of oVirt] has now been renamed to RHV, "RHEV" was changed to "RHV" throughout the tooling. In particular, -o rhev becomes -o rhv, although the old name can be used for backwards compatibility.

The "RHEV-APT" utility is only installed when the output hypervisor is oVirt or RHV.

A problem with virt-v2v running out of memory when doing an SELinux relabel of the guest filesystem should now be resolved.

Language bindings

Setting "EXTRA_JAVAC_FLAGS" before ./configure allows you to add arbitrary flags to "javac" when compiling the Java bindings.

Use of any libguestfs API which returned a single struct, from Perl or Java bindings, would have leaked memory. This has now been fixed (Pino Toscano).

Inspection

Inspection of Windows guests with mildly corrupted Windows Registry hives should now work instead of failing with an error. This feature requires hivex ≥ 1.3.14 (Dawid Zamirski).

For Debian guests, we can now read the URL, source name, summary and full description of installed packages. For RPM-based guests we can read the URL, summary and description (Pino Toscano).

Inspection of guest operating systems that use a separate /usr partition should now work more reliably (Pino Toscano).

When parsing guest /etc/fstab, paths are reduced to a canonical form (eg. "///usr//local//" → "/usr/local").

Inspection of btrfs subvolumes now works where the /etc/fstab options field contains commas.

/dev/cdN devices in guest /etc/fstab are ignored (Pino Toscano).

Architectures and platforms

Stable releases are now tested on aarch64, ppc64 and ppc64le architectures.

The RISC-V architecture is now handled as a guest, and libguestfs will now at least compile on RISC-V (but probably not work as there is no usable qemu at the time of writing).

Detection of S/390 and S/390x binaries and guests is now supported.

Other

ExFAT filesystems are now supported (Miles Wolbe).

Security¶

See also guestfs-security(1).

There were no CVEs reported in this development cycle. However some security-related hardening was carried out as described below.

Temporary filenames are now always generated using randomness from /dev/urandom (previously the C function random(3) was used in one case).

The $TERM environment variable is now validated before passing it through to the appliance kernel command line.

API¶

New APIs

"guestfs_aug_transform"

Exposes the Augeas "aug_transform" API (Pino Toscano).

"guestfs_find_inode"

Find files by inode number (Matteo Cafasso).

"guestfs_inspect_get_windows_software_hive"

"guestfs_inspect_get_windows_system_hive"

Return the path to the Windows "HKLM\SYSTEM" and "HKLM\SOFTWARE" hives computed during inspection.

"guestfs_mksquashfs"

Create a squashfs filesystem from a path (Pino Toscano).

Other API changes

"guestfs_add_domain"

This call now handles libvirt file-based volumes correctly, where previously these would have been ignored. Also handled are disks which require libvirt authentication secrets to open (Pino Toscano).

"guestfs_canonical_device_name"

This call will no longer incorrectly modify Linux software RAID device names (like /dev/mdX).

"guestfs_file_architecture"

Previously the "file_architecture" API could return either of the strings "i386" or "i486" for 32 bit x86 binaries. It now only returns "i386" (as documented).

This API can now return the following new values: "riscv32", "riscv64", "riscv128", "s390", "s390x".

"guestfs_hivex_open"

This now has an optional "GUESTFS_HIVEX_OPEN_UNSAFE" flag which allows certain corrupted Windows Registry hives to be opened. This feature requires hivex ≥ 1.3.14 (Dawid Zamirski).

"guestfs_list_partitions"

This call now returns Linux software RAID partitions.

"guestfs_part_to_dev"

This call now correctly handles partition names which include "p<N>" (Pino Toscano).

"guestfs_set_label"

This call can now change the labels of swap partitions (Pino Toscano).

Build changes¶

libmagic, the library part of the "file" command, is now required at build time (previously optional).

GCC 7 is now supported.

"Silent rules" are now used for OCaml programs, Java bindings. To show the full command line executed, add "V=1" on the make command line (Pino Toscano).

Slow testing ("make check-slow") now covers: firstboot scripts in Linux guests; v2v conversion of a selection of real Linux guests; the virt-customize --hostname and --timezone settings; the --root-password parameter; that the serial console works in virt-builder guests.

Large generated C source files, eg. the list of commands found in fish/cmds.c (and many more), have been split into smaller files to speed parallel compilation.

"make maintainer-check-extra-dist" now checks that all generated files are included in the tarball.

The tests no longer assume that "." is in Perl's @INC, as it is going to be removed soon (Pino Toscano).

Debian hosts using UsrMerge are now supported (Pino Toscano).

Header files and C structs can now have internal documentation using the special "/** ... */" comments.

"@VAR@" subtitutions in "./run" are now fully quoted. This is necessary so that (eg) "./configure PYTHON=/some/path" works robustly if "/some/path" contains characters that need to be quoted (Hilko Bengen).

gperf ≥ 3.1 is now supported.

Kraxel's old edk2 builds can no longer be used for UEFI support. UEFI code is now fully free software, so use the versions bundled with your Linux distro instead.

Virt-p2v can now be compiled on RHEL 5 (2007-era) Linux with Gtk 2.10.

Internals¶

The generator and mllib "Common_utils" modules are now shared from the same source file.

A considerable amount of common code has been moved into the common directory in the source and is now compiled only once. The mini-libraries located under here are: common/edit, common/errnostring, common/miniexpect, common/options, common/parallel, common/progress, common/protocol, common/utils, common/visit, common/windows.

The directory containing the main library code has moved from src → lib.

All tests written in shell script now use a common file of utility functions (tests/test-functions.sh). There are several new utility functions, mainly for skipping tests. Also these test scripts can now use autoconf-like path variables like $abs_top_srcdir.

UEFI paths are now stored in the generator (generator/uefi.ml).

The way the generator handles actions and procedure numbers was changed quite substantially. See generator/actions_*.ml and generator/proc_nr.ml.

The gnulib "getprogname" module is now used everywhere when needing/printing the program name (Pino Toscano).

perl/Guestfs.c is not translatable (Nikos Skalkotos).

Virt-builder templates moved from builder/website to builder/templates and there is now a single unified program which can build any template.

All Windows registry utilities used by virt-customize and virt-v2v have been moved to a common module called "Registry" under mllib.

All POSIX bindings have been moved to a new module called "Unix_utils" under mllib.

Inspection, virt-customize and virt-v2v no longer recompute the Windows "%systemroot%", "CurrentControlSet" or paths to the "HKLM\SYSTEM" and "HKLM\SOFTWARE" hives in multiple places. Instead these are all computed once (during inspection) and passed to the other tools through various "guestfs_inspect_get_windows_*" APIs.

"/dev/pts" is now available inside the appliance, so any tools we run which require a pty will now work (Pino Toscano).

Most OCaml warnings have been fixed.

There is now a single common function for creating temporary files ("guestfs_int_make_temp_path") (Matteo Cafasso).

The $TERM environment variable is now validated before passing it through to the appliance kernel command line.

Useless USB and memballoon devices are no longer created in the appliance (Laine Stump).

On aarch64 we now use virtio-pci for the appliance. This is somewhat faster than virtio-mmio.

Use of srandom(3) and random(3) has been minimized. In particular, temporary filenames are no longer created based on randomness returned by random(3), but /dev/urandom is used instead.

Bugs fixed¶

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1425306

typo error in virt-tail man page

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1418283

virt-v2v: appliance runs out of memory running setfiles command

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1417549

/usr/bin/x86_64-linux-gnu-ld.bfd.real: ../common/progress/.libs/libprogress.a(libprogress_la-progress.o): undefined reference to symbol 'UP@@NCURSES_TINFO_5.0.19991023'

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1417444

*** No rule to make target '../perl/lib/Sys/Guestfs.c', needed by 'libguestfs.pot'

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1416941

compile of 1.34.3 fails with gperf 3.1

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1414682

guestfs_canonical_device_name incorrectly returns /dev/sd0 for MD devices (/dev/md0)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1414510

guestfs_list_filesystems does not recognize ddf partitions

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1409023

[Debian] ldmtool not installed in the appliance

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1404287

qemu-kvm cannot boot RHEL 7 kernel with TCG, hangs at "Probing EDD (edd=off to disable)..."

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1404182

RFE: virt-resize should support a URL as the outdisk

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1401474

Importing VMs from VMware is failing with error "Inspection field 'i_arch' was 'unknown'"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1401320

RFE: Increate virt-sysprep coverage a bit

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1400205

Add --vdsm-compat=1.1 flag for VDSM

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1398070

typo error in man page

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1392798

secrets from libvirt domains are not read

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1390876

"--machine-readable" info should be updated in virt-v2v manual page

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1379289

RFE: virt-p2v should support mnemonic operations

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1378022

There is virt-v2v warning about <listen type='none'> during converting a guest which has listen type='none' in XML

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1377081

virt-p2v manual should update the new dialog information

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1375157

virt-v2v: -i ova: Permission denied when using libvirt and running as root

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1374651

Can't install qxl driver for display device in win7 guest after converting to glance by virt-v2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1374405

There is HTTP 404 error info when convert guest to glance by virt-v2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1374232

selinux relabel fails on RHEL 6.2 guests with "libguestfs error: selinux_relabel: : Success"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1372668

Process status is not normal in windows guest after converted from kvm to rhev by virt-v2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1372269

Builder does not set hostname properly for Debian 8 (Jessie)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1371843

Improve OVA import compatibility

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1370424

virt-manager coredump when vm with gluster image exists

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1367839

Cannot import VMs from Xen and VMware when using RHEL7.3 host.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1367738

Missing bash completion scripts for: virt-diff guestunmount virt-copy-in virt-copy-out virt-customize virt-get-kernel virt-p2v-make-disk virt-p2v-make-kickstart virt-tar-in virt-tar-out virt-v2v-copy-to-local virt-win-reg

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1367615

OVMF file which is built for rhel7.3 can't be used for virt-v2v uefi conversion

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1366456

Converting rhel7 host installed on RAID:warning: fstrim: fstrim: /sysroot/: the discard operation is not supported

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1366049

RFE: libvirt backend: support handling disks stored as volume name in a pool

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1365005

Guest name is incorrect if convert guest from disk image by virt-v2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1362649

RFE: virt-sysprep does not utilize libguestfs encryption support

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1354507

virt-v2v conversions from vCenter do not consistently obey the proxy environment variables

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1168144

warning: fstrim: fstrim: /sysroot/: FITRIM ioctl failed: Operation not supported (ignored) when convert win2003 guest from xen server

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1161019

RFE: Only install RHEV-APT if virt-v2v -o rhev/-o vdsm option is used

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1152369

virt-v2v failed to convert RHEL 6.7 UEFI guest: no grub1/grub-legacy or grub2 configuration file was found

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1141631

[RFE] virt-v2v should support convert a guest to a dir-pool with using pool's uuid

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1134878

libvirt reports json "backing file" is missing

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1019388

firstboot scripts (virt-builder, virt-sysprep) don't work for Debian 6 & 7 guests

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/737600

virt-v2v windows xp - machine dies BSOD - processr,sys - workaround provided

New features¶

Multiple performance enhancements were made in libguestfs. The "hot cache" time to launch to appliance should be under 1 second assuming recent qemu and kernel are installed. There are also new utilities for precisely benchmarking libguestfs (utils/boot-benchmark and utils/boot-analysis in the source tree).

The virt-p2v tool for converting physical machines to virtual machines was substantially improved. This includes: clearer, coloured output during conversions, support for Gtk 3, more detailed information about hardware, click to identify network interfaces, more debugging tools included with the ISO, and many bug fixes.

f2fs (Flash Friendly File System) is now supported (Pino Toscano).

New tools

virt-p2v-make-kiwi(1) can be used to build the virt-p2v ISO based on SLES and openSUSE, using the kiwi utility (Cédric Bosdonnat).

New features in existing tools

virt-resize will now preserve the GPT GUID. This was required for Windows Server 2012 R2, where the bootloader would become confused if the GUID changed (Maxim Perevedentsev).

virt-resize will use sparse copying for (old MBR-style) extended partitions. This makes resizing of guests that use extended partitions much faster (Maxim Perevedentsev).

virt-p2v kernel command line options can now be used to set defaults for GUI configuration.

The virt-p2v debugging options have been completely removed, simplifying the interface and documentation. Debugging information is now captured fully automatically.

virt-p2v-make-disk lets you specify an --arch option, allowing you to build a 32 bit virt-p2v, for compatibility with older systems.

virt-p2v-make-disk no longer requires that you specify an "os-version" for the virt-p2v disk. If omitted it will try to choose a suitable "os-version" depending on your host system.

virt-p2v-make-disk and virt-p2v-make-kickstart both gain a new --install option that allows you to add arbitrary extra packages to the virt-p2v ISO, for customization, additional debugging tools and so on.

virt-v2v will now uninstall Parallels Tools (or the equivalent Virtuozzo Tools) from Linux guests. Also stop the Windows drivers from loading at boot. (Roman Kagan and Pavel Butsykin)

virt-v2v --in-place mode has been enhanced to allow the caller to choose whether or not to install certain virtio drivers in the guest (Roman Kagan).

virt-v2v conversion of Windows guests was substantially rewritten and simplified (Roman Kagan).

virt-v2v --in-place mode now supports installing virtio-scsi drivers in guests (Roman Kagan).

virt-v2v can now convert SUSE guests and SUSE guests using UEFI (Cédric Bosdonnat and Jim Fehlig).

virt-v2v can now convert guests to Glance that have multiple disks. Previously it would fail on such guests.

The virt-v2v --no-trim and --vmtype options are now no-ops. They will print a warning but are otherwise ignored. virt-v2v can now generate the OVF vmtype correctly without user intervention.

virt-v2v has now been tested against SUSE Xen as a source hypervisor (Cédric Bosdonnat).

virt-v2v adds support for SUSE VMDP drivers (Cédric Bosdonnat).

virt-v2v can convert OVA files containing subfolders, as produced by SUSE Studio (Cédric Bosdonnat).

virt-v2v sets the OVF "<Origin>" element correctly. oVirt has been extended to support more source hypervisors (Shahar Havivi).

virt-v2v now supports Windows Server 2016 (Tomáš Golembiovský).

The virt-builder --list option can now be used to show all templates or a single template (Pino Toscano).

All OCaml-based tools now use getopt_long(3) for option parsing, and --help output has been improved (Pino Toscano).

virt-builder and virt-customize --selinux-relabel option can now fully relabel the guest filesystem at build time, without requiring a lengthy autorelabel at first boot.

virt-customize --delete now accepts globs.

New virt-customize --uninstall option lets you uninstall packages.

virt-customize can now use "pvvxsvc" as an alternative to "rhsrvany" for running firstboot scripts in Windows guests (Cédric Bosdonnat).

virt-customize now uses the strongest hashing scheme for passwords on Arch and Void Linux (Pino Toscano).

virt-customize --install now works correctly on Arch (Pino Toscano).

virt-inspector has new options --no-applications and --no-icon to prevent the list of applications and icon from being included in the XML output (Pino Toscano).

New virt-sysprep --network option has been added, allowing you to actually use the --install etc options which were present in virt-sysprep before but did not usually work. Note that the network is still disabled by default.

virt-sysprep "fs-uuids" operation no longer fails on btrfs guests (Maxim Perevedentsev).

virt-dib can output Docker images (Pino Toscano).

virt-dib has a new --drive-format option to allow the user to specify the format of the helper drive (Pino Toscano).

All OCaml virt tools now have a --colors/--colours option which enables coloured output (using ANSI escape sequences) even if the output is not a tty. The default is to check if the output is a tty and disable coloured output if not. This allows coloured output to be consumed by other tools.

Language bindings

PHP test coverage has been enhanced (Pino Toscano).

PHP 7 is now supported (Pino Toscano).

Python bindings are now compliant with PEP 8 (Pino Toscano).

A Python pip package is available in http://libguestfs.org/download/python/

The Ruby bindings now print the full exception if one is thrown by the event callback. Note this is still incorrect behaviour as event callbacks should not throw exceptions, but it aids debugging.

All OCaml libraries and programs are now compiled with -safe-string, if supported by the OCaml compiler.

Inspection

Alpine Linux using busybox can now be inspected. Also the APK package manager is supported in virt-customize (Pino Toscano).

We now handle inspection of Mageia 4 (Pino Toscano).

Void Linux and the Void Linux xbps package manager are fully supported (Pino Toscano).

Parsing of CoreOS version information has been enhanced (Pino Toscano).

It is now possible to get an icon from ALT Linux (Pino Toscano).

PLD Linux versions < 3 are now recognized (Pino Toscano).

Windows drive letters are now returned for guests using GPT partitions (Dawid Zamirski).

We can now correctly inspect Unix guests that do not have an /etc/fstab file (Pino Toscano).

Added another source for the Ubuntu icon which doesn't rely on GNOME having been installed in the guest.

We can now get an icon for Windows 7 64 bit guests.

Libosinfo integration was rewritten to deal with the new database format used by osinfo (Pino Toscano).

Documentation

New manual page guestfs-building(1) describes how to build libguestfs from source.

The man pages, tools and tool --help output is now automatically checked to ensure that all tool options are properly documented, that warning sections are included where necessary, and that every page has a description section.

The guestfs-testing(1) man page has been refreshed and based on a newer libguestfs.

Architectures and platforms

virt-customize now works on POWER7 and POWER8 platforms, both big endian and little endian (Xianghua Chen and Hu Zhang).

Security¶

See also guestfs-security(1).

CVE-2015-8869

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/CVE-2015-8869

This vulnerability in OCaml might affect virt tools written in the OCaml programming language. It affects only 64 bit platforms. Because this bug affects code generation it is difficult to predict which precise software could be affected, and therefore our recommendation is that you recompile libguestfs using a version of the OCaml compiler where this bug has been fixed (or ask your Linux distro to do the same).

virt-customize ownership of .ssh, .ssh/authorized_keys

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1337561

Previously when virt-customize injected an SSH key into a guest, when it created the ~/.ssh and ~/.ssh/authorized_keys directory and file (in case they were missing) it created them with owner and group "root.root". This has been fixed so the correct user is used. This is not thought to have been exploitable.

Windows "%systemroot%"

The inspection code has been made more robust against guests which might use very long "%systemroot%" (derived from the guest-controlled Windows Registry). This is not thought to have been exploitable.

Virtio-rng is now available in the appliance

virtio-rng (the virtual Random Number Generator device) is now passed to the appliance, which should improve the quality random numbers generated for GUIDs and cryptographic key generation.

API¶

New APIs

"btrfs_filesystem_show"

List all devices where a btrfs filesystem is spanned (Pino Toscano).

"download_blocks"

"download_inode"

"filesystem_walk"

Download filesystem data blocks from a given partition. Download arbitrary files by inode number. Retrieve all files from a filesystem including deleted files.

Note these require optional dependency The Sleuth Kit. (Matteo Cafasso)

"get_sockdir"

Read the path where temporary sockets are stored (Pino Toscano).

"mountable_device"

"mountable_subvolume"

Split a Mountable into device name and subvolume (Cédric Bosdonnat).

"ntfscat_i"

Download NTFS file by inode number (Matteo Cafasso).

"part_expand_gpt"

Allow in-place expanding of GPT partitions by moving the second (backup) partition table to the end of the disk (Maxim Perevedentsev).

"part_get_disk_guid"

"part_set_disk_guid"

"part_set_disk_guid_random"

Get and set the GPT disk GUID, or set it to a fresh random value (Maxim Perevedentsev).

"selinux_relabel"

SELinux-relabel part or all of the guest filesystem.

Other API changes

"guestfs_set_selinux", "guestfs_get_selinux", "guestfs_setcon", "guestfs_getcon" and "guestfs_llz" have been deprecated. Use the new API "guestfs_selinux_relabel" to relabel filesystems. Use "guestfs_lgetxattrs" to list the "security.selinux" extended attributes of existing files.

"guestfs_vfs_minimum_size" can now be used on dirty filesystems (Maxim Perevedentsev).

"guestfs_ll" now works on paths which contain absolute symlinks (Pino Toscano).

"guestfs_glob_expand" now has an optional "directoryslash" boolean parameter which controls whether trailing slashes are returned for directory names (Pino Toscano).

"guestfs_lvs" will no longer return LVs which have the "activationskip" flag set. The reason is that such LVs have no "/dev/VG/LV" device node and so code which read the list of LVs and then probed the devices themselves would immediately fail. You can use "guestfs_lvs_full" if you want to read all LVs. (Pino Toscano).

"guestfs_list_disk_labels" now no longer fails if no disks with labels were added. Instead it now returns an empty list (Pino Toscano).

"guestfs_is_lv" no longer fails if passed a btrfs subvolume, it returns false instead (Maxim Perevedentsev).

Build changes¶

qemu ≥ 1.3.0 is required.

yajl (a JSON parsing library) is required to build libguestfs.

You can now build with GCC 6.

"make check-valgrind" now has substantially better coverage.

"make check-slow" now works again.

Use "make -C appliance clean-supermin-appliance" to clean the supermin appliance (it will be rebuilt on next "make").

There are a variety of new rules for running virt-p2v from the source directory: "make -C p2v run-virt-p2v-directly" | "run-virt-p2v-in-a-vm" | "run-virt-p2v-non-gui-conversion". These are documented further in guestfs-hacking(1).

virt-p2v may be built using either Gtk 2 or Gtk 3. To force a particular version of Gtk to be used, "./configure --with-gtk=2|3"

The "./configure" options are now mostly documented in guestfs-building(1).

Internals¶

In git, versions are now tagged with "v1.XX.YY" (previously they were tagged with "1.XX.YY"). Using the "v-" prefix is more common in git repositories.

When using the libvirt backend, we now wait for qemu to exit gracefully instead of killing it after 15 seconds. This helps when writing to slow devices (especially cheap USB keys).

Error messages from libvirt now include the "err->int1" field which usually contains the "errno".

On ARM, all DTB (device tree) code has been removed. qemu creates the right device tree on the fly, we do not need to specify one.

The C API tests now use larger test disks, allowing BTRFS to be tested properly (Pino Toscano).

The tests should now work on a pure Python 3 host (Pino Toscano).

In C bindings, internal functions are now (mostly) consistently named "guestfs_int_*" whereas previously there was no consistent scheme.

The old "safe_malloc" etc functions are now no longer exported by the library, nor used in language bindings.

Setting TMPDIR to a path longer than ~ 100 characters will no longer cause libguestfs to fail silently and randomly when creating Unix domain sockets (Pino Toscano).

The "COMPILE_REGEXP" macro can now be used in the daemon.

When tracing, results containing structs are now printed in full (Pino Toscano).

The Perl "Sys::Guestfs" module now no longer embeds an incrementing API "version number". This module is now always at phony version "1.0". To find the real version of libguestfs from Perl you must call "$g->version".

All code is compiled with "-Wstack-usage=10000" and multiple changes have been made to remove stack allocation of large strings and buffers.

The error(3) function is now used everywhere, replacing most previous uses of perror(3) + exit(3), and fprintf(3) + exit.

In C code, "/**" comments are turned into documentation which is automatically added to the guestfs-hacking(1) manual page.

A safe "getumask" function has been added. For recent Linux kernels this uses the newly added "Umask" field in /proc/self/status. For older Linux and other Unix, this uses a thread-safe technique involving fork(2) (thanks: Josh Stone, Jiri Jaburek, Eric Blake).

Safe posix_fadvise(2) wrappers have been added, and more hints have been added to the code which may make a minor difference to performance.

A safe wrapper around waitpid(2) has been added which handles "INTR" properly.

"podwrapper.pl" (used to generate the manual pages) now stops if any POD error is found. A new script called "podcheck.pl" does cross-checking of --help output, tool options and manual pages.

All version numbers in the library (eg. versions of qemu, versions of libvirt, versions of guest operating systems) are unified in a single file src/version.c (Pino Toscano).

On Windows guests, virt-customize will use the vendor-neutral path "C:\Program Files\Guestfs\Firstboot" to store firstboot scripts. Previously it used "C:\Program Files\Red Hat\Firstboot". This change should be invisible to the scripts themselves. (Cédric Bosdonnat)

On Linux guests, the firstboot services generated by virt-builder --firstboot etc have been renamed to "guestfs-firstboot" (Pino Toscano).

There is now a common "debug" function used by all OCaml tools, replacing previous code which did "if verbose () then printf ...".

virt-p2v copies files it needs over to the virt-v2v conversion server using scp(1), instead of trying to send them via the shell session. This should improve reliability and should be a completely transparent to end users.

All code in mllib is now built into a single "mllib.cma" or "mllib.cmxa" library. All code in customize is now built into a single "customize.cma" or "customize.cmxa" library. This simplifies the build of the OCaml tools.

lvmetad(8) is now used in the appliance when available (Pino Toscano).

"Silent rules" are used for OCaml, Java, Erlang and POD. Use "make V=1" to see the full command lines again (Pino Toscano).

Bugs fixed¶

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1364347

virt-sparsify --in-place failed with UEFI system

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1362357

run_command runs exit handlers when execve fails (e.g. due to missing executable)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1362354

virt-dib failed to create image using DIB_YUM_REPO_CONF

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1359652

Fail to inspect Windows ISO file

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1358142

Some info will show when convert guest to libvirt by virt-v2v with parameter --quiet

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1354335

overlay of disk images does not specify the format of the backing file

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1352761

Virt-manager can't show OS icons of win7/win8/ubuntu guest.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1350363

Improve error info "remote server timeout unexpectedly waiting for password prompt" when connect to a bogus server at p2v client

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1348900

virt-p2v should update error prompt when 'Test connection' with a non-existing user in conversion server

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1345813

virt-sysprep --install always failed to install the packages specified

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1345809

virt-customize --truncate-recursive should give an error message when specifying a no-existing path

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1343423

[RFE]Should give a better description about 'curl error 22' when failed using ssh identity http url at p2v client

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1343414

Failed SSH to conversion server by ssh identity http url at p2v client

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1343375

[RFE] uninstall packages inside the VM

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1342447

Ifconfig command is not supported on p2v client

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1342398

Convert a guest from RHEL by virt-v2v but its origin info shows RHEV at rhevm

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1342337

Should remind a warning about disk image has a partition when using virt-p2v-make-disk

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1341984

virt-get-kernel prompts an 'invalid value' error when using --format auto

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1341564

virt-p2v spinner should be hidden when it stops spinning

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1340809

Testing connection timeout when input regular user of conversion server with checked "use sudo......"button

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1340464

[RFE] Suggestion give user a reminder for "Cancel conversion" button

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1340407

Multiple network ports will not be aligned at p2v client

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1338083

Update UEFI whitelist for official fedora packages

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1337561

virt-customize --ssh-inject not applying correct file permission

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1335671

extra quotes around UUID confuses findfs in RHEL (but not in Fedora)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1332025

Inspection does not parse /etc/redhat-release containing "Derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 (Source)"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1327488

RFE: Allow p2v kernel options without p2v.server to set defaults

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1325825

virt-v2v should prevent using multiple '-b' and '-n' option appears on the command line

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1321620

libguestfs: error: could not parse integer in version number: 7"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1321338

[1.33.16] Compilation Error: Unbound value List.sort_uniq in v2v.ml line 988, characters 10-24:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1317843

`virt-builder --update` fails with: "dnf -y --best upgrade: command exited with an error"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1316479

v2v cmd cannot exit and "block I/O error in device 'appliance': No space left on device (28)" is printed when specified "-v -x"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1316041

virt-rescue fails, but missing error message

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1314244

RFE: virt-p2v log window should process colour escapes and backspaces

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1312254

virt-v2v -o libvirt doesn't preserve or use correct <graphics type="vnc|spice">

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1309706

error: internal error: Invalid floppy device name: hdb

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1309619

Wrong warning info "use standard VGA" shows when converting windows > 7 by virt-v2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1309580

OS name of win8.1 x64 guest shows incorrect in rhevm3.6 general info

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1308769

virt-v2v does not copy additional disks to Glance

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1306666

Failure when disk contains an LV with activationskip=y

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1296606

virt-v2v doesn't remove VirtualBox additions correctly because of file quoting

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1293527

There should be a reminder to avoid user to edit a guest image by multiple tools at the same time in guestfish man page

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1293276

guestfish can not ll a symbolic link dir or edit a file in it

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1278878

guestfish should be able to handle LVM thin layouts

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1264835

ppc64le: virt-customize --install fail to detect the guest arch

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1264332

Test that trimming in virt-v2v doesn't regress

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1232192

Virt-v2v gives an error on a blank disk: part_get_parttype: unknown signature, of the output: BYT;

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1229386

virt-p2v in non-GUI mode doesn't show any conversion progress or status

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1227599

P2V invalid password prints unexpected end of file waiting for command prompt.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1224795

On Ubuntu, virt-builder --install and --update cannot use the network

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1213324

virt-v2v: warning: unknown guest operating system: windows windows 6.3 when converting win8,win8.1,win2012,win2012R2,win10 to rhev

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1203898

Support inspecting docker images without /etc/fstab

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1186935

libguestfs cannot inspect recent Fedora / RHEL >= 7 when /usr is a separate partition

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1167916

P2V: invalid conversion server prints unexpected end of file waiting for password prompt.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1152825

virt-rescue --selinux can not work well, when enable selinux in the command line the value of 'getenforce' is still Disabled in virt-rescue appliance

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1150298

ARM 32 bit on Ubuntu: warning: cast to pointer from integer of different size [-Wint-to-pointer-cast]

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1089100

NetworkManager avc unlink denied for resolv.conf after using --selinux-relabel

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/983969

RFE: virt-sysprep should be SELinux-aware

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/855058

RFE: virt-p2v: display more information about storage devices

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/554829

SELinux handling could be done better.

New features¶

New tools

The new virt-v2v-copy-to-local(1) tool is an ancillary tool for virt-v2v(1) allowing you to convert source guests that virt-v2v is unable to access directly.

New features in existing tools

Virt-customize knows how to write a random seed to CirrOS (Pino Toscano).

On Fedora, virt-customize runs dnf(8) with the --best flag, ensuring it always updates to the latest available packages.

Virt-builder now provides 32 bit Fedora templates.

Virt-builder and virt-customize --install option now works on 32 bit Fedora guests. Previously it would try to install 64 bit packages (Jan Sedlák).

Virt-builder can now fetch cloud images using Simple Streams v1.0 metadata (Pino Toscano).

Virt-builder can now fetch openSUSE cloud images out of the box (Cédric Bosdonnat).

Virt-customize will now use stronger (SHA-512) encrypted passwords by default on openSUSE ≥ 11 (Pino Toscano).

Virt-builder will now correctly handle output filenames containing colon characters (":"), and will create temporary files in the libguestfs cache directory instead of defaulting to /tmp (Pino Toscano).

Virt-resize has a new --unknown-filesystems option to control what to do when asked to resize a filesystem that libguestfs doesn't know how to resize.

Virt-v2v now has an --in-place flag/mode, allowing in-place conversion of guests (Roman Kagan).

Virt-v2v has a --compressed option for creating compressed qcow2 output files.

Virt-v2v can now correctly get the VMware datacenter path (dcPath) from libvirt, instead of having to calculate it using an algorithm that occasionally got the wrong answer (Matthias Bolte, Tingting Zheng).

Virt-v2v now processes RAM sizes correctly for 64 bit guests when running on a 32 bit host.

Language bindings

In Perl and Python programs, the "get_program_name" API now returns the true program name, instead of the incorrect string "perl" or "python".

The Python bindings can now be compiled against a different version of libguestfs, allowing the pip module to be built against any version of libguestfs (instead of requiring the pip module and libguestfs to have exactly the same version).

The quality of the Ruby rdoc (documentation) has been improved (Pino Toscano).

Perl scripts no longer hard-code the location of perl in the shebang line, but use env(1) to locate it instead (Pino Toscano).

In OCaml programs, the guestfs handle was incorrectly made into a global root, meaning it could never be garbage collected. If you didn't call the "close" function explicitly, the handle would not be closed until the whole program exited. This has now been fixed so handles will be garbage collected in the usual way. This changes the API of the OCaml function "Guestfs.event_callback". Note that non-C language bindings are not covered by the libguestfs API/ABI guarantee, although we try hard not to change them, but in this case it was essential in order to fix this very serious bug.

Inspection

Alpine Linux and the APK package manager, ALT Linux, Frugalware, and PLD Linux are now recognized (Pino Toscano).

If it exists, /etc/os-release will be preferred for inspecting Linux guests (Pino Toscano).

The correct kernel version is returned for Windows guests ≥ 10.

Documentation

The large guestfs(3) man page has been split into several separate man pages: guestfs-hacking(1) guestfs-internals(1) guestfs-security(1). In the source tree, a new docs directory contains this documentation.

Architectures and platforms

Libguestfs now supports ARM 64 bit platforms with vGICv3.

Security¶

See also guestfs-security(1).

"CVE-2015-5745"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1251157

This is not a vulnerability in libguestfs, but because we always give a virtio-serial port to each guest (since that is how guest-host communication happens), an escalation from the appliance to the host qemu process is possible. This could affect you if:

Virt-customize permissions on .ssh, .ssh/authorized_keys

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1260778.

Previously when asked to inject an SSH key into a guest, virt-customize (hence virt-builder too) would create the .ssh directory and .ssh/authorized_keys file with too broad permissions, allowing other users to read. They are now created as 0700 and 0600 respectively, which is the same as the ssh-copy-id(1) utility.

API¶

New APIs

"guestfs_get_identifier"

"guestfs_set_identifier"

Get/set a per-handle identifier. The main effect of this is to change trace output from:

 libguestfs: trace: foo
    

to:

 libguestfs: trace: ID: foo
    

making it easier to follow traces in multi-threaded programs, or where a program uses multiple handles (especially virt-v2v).

"guestfs_vfs_minimum_size"

Return the minimum size of a filesystem (when shrunk). This supports ext2/3/4, XFS and btrfs, and can support other filesystem types in future (Maxim Perevedentsev).

Other API changes

"guestfs_disk_create": add "preallocation" = "off"/"metadata"/"full".

For raw, this allows "off" as a synonym for "sparse" (making it consistent with qcow2). For qcow2, this allows "sparse" as a synonym for "off".

It also adds "full", which corresponds to fully allocated, but uses posix_fallocate(3) for efficiency.

"guestfs_tar_in": new "xattrs", "selinux", "acl" parameters.

"guestfs_tar_out": new "xattrs", "selinux", "acl" parameters.

These extra parameters control whether extended attributes, SELinux contexts and/or POSIX ACLs are restored from / saved to tarballs.

"guestfs_add_drive"

The existing "username" and "secret" parameters can be used to supply authentication for iSCSI (Pino Toscano).

Build changes¶

The "./configure --enable-valgrind-daemon" option has been removed.

You can no longer build libguestfs on RHEL 5-era (c.2007) machines. See the "oldlinux" branch if you need (limited) RHEL 5 support.

Virt-p2v can now be built on RHEL 6-era (c.2010) Linux distros.

OCaml ≥ 3.11 (released in 2008) is now required to build from git.

Building the Perl bindings now requires "Module::Build" (instead of "ExtUtils::MakeMaker").

Builds should be faster (especially when incrementally rebuilding), because work was done to reduce build times.

Both OCaml and the OCaml findlib module are required if you need to run the generator at build time. Previously the build would have failed if findlib was not installed.

"make check" tests now run in parallel (within each test directory).

"make install" no longer installs OCaml bindtests.* files incorrectly.

"make install" can now be run twice. Previously it would fail on the second run.

"make clean" should now remove nearly every file that "make" creates.

A new "make installcheck" rule has been added, allowing the installed copy of libguestfs to be tested.

Internals¶

Some effort was put into minimizing the size of the appliance, which reduces temporary disk space and time needed by libguestfs handles.

The appliance now passes the NIC name to dhcpd, fixing hangs when running the appliance on some distros (Cédric Bosdonnat).

OCaml "Guestfs.Errno" is now generated (Pino Toscano).

In OCaml tools, common code now handles --debug-gc, --verbose and other common options (Roman Kagan, Pino Toscano).

The virt-v2v test harness allows us to boot the test guests at fixed dates in the past, ensuring that Windows reactivation doesn't kick in.

There is a new internal API for reading/writing a subprocess via a pipe from library code.

Used "deheader" program to remove unused "#include" directives.

In OCaml tools, the "Char" and "String" modules now implicitly reference the "Common_utils.Char" and "Common_utils.String" modules (instead of the ones from stdlib). The "Common_utils" modules contain a number of extra char/string utility functions, and also hide some unsafe functions in stdlib.

Many more virt-v2v tests will now be run even if you don't have rhsrvany and virtio-win installed (Roman Kagan).

The huge configure.ac file has been split into several smaller files called m4/guestfs_*.m4.

The old tests/data and tests/guests directories have been moved to test-data/. This new top level directory carries all test data which is common, large and/or shared between multiple tests.

There is a new top level website/ directory containing the public http://libguestfs.org website (or most of it).

The fuzz testing of inspection (tests/fuzz) has been removed.

Virt-p2v now saves the source physical machine dmesg output into the conversion server debug directory, making it simpler to debug cases of missing drivers, firmware etc.

Bugs fixed¶

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1294956

set-label returns wrong error message when set the ext3/ext4 filesystem label

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1288733

Add a Fedora 23 32-bit base image for virt-builder

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1288201

virt-builder writes temporary files to /tmp

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1285847

virt-resize does not copy logical partitions

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1281578

virt-inspector returns version 6.3 for win10 images (should return 10.0)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1281577

virt-inspector --xpath segfault on attribute get

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1280029

libguestfs can run commands with stdin not open (or worse still, connected to arbitrary guest-chosen random devices)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1279273

About compression option for qcow2

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1278878

guestfish should be able to handle LVM thin layouts

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1278382

DNF python programming error when run from virt-builder

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1278371

inspection returns arch="unknown" for Windows guest if file command is not installed

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1277274

Document permissions needed for non-admin users to use virt-v2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1277122

RFE: virt-sparsify: make '--in-place' sparsification safe to abort (gracefully or ungracefully)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1277074

Virt-p2v client shouldn't present the vdsm option because it's not usable

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1276540

virt-v2v fails to convert Windows raw image: error "device name is not a partition"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1275806

virt-builder: error: [file] is not a regular file in the guest

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1270011

Simplestreams test fails: virt-builder: error: the value for the key 'size' is not an integer

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1267032

guestfish copy-in command behaves oddly/unexpectedly with wildcards

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1262983

python: Cannot compile pip module if installed libguestfs != pip guestfs version

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1262127

Better diagnostic message when virbr0 doesn't exist

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1261436

No warning shows when convert a win7 guest with AVG AntiVirus installed

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1260778

virt-builder --ssh-inject doesn't set proper permissions on created files

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1260689

RFE: V2V to check and warn user to disable group policy and anti virus on Windows guests

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1260590

Wrong graphics protocal and video type set for guest after convert to rhev 3.6 by virt-v2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1258342

extra slashes in vcenter URL confuses virt-v2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1257895

[RHEV][V2V] virt-v2v ignores NIC if interface source/@network or source/@bridge is an empty string

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1256405

virt-builder created Fedora 22 32bit disk image cannot be updated

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1256222

virt-p2v no GUI mode:error opening control connection to $ip:22:unexpected …rompt

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1251909

Option -oa preallocated -of qcow2 of virt-v2v didn't work efficiently

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1250715

v2v: spaces need to be escaped as %20 in paths

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1248678

Close all incoming ports on virt-p2v ISO

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1246882

man virt-customize shows synopsis twice

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1242853

mount-loop failed to setup loop device: No such file or directory

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1237136

BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at <addr> in function __blkg_lookup

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1230412

virt-v2v should ignore bogus kernel entries in grub config

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1229119

Unrelated info in fstab makes virt-v2v fail with unclear error info

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1227609

virt-p2v: Using "Back" button causes output list to be repopulated multiple times

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1225789

Wrong video driver is installed for rhel5.11 guest after conversion to libvirt

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1204131

RFE: virt-builder creates qcow v3 images, add build option for qcow v2

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1176801

File /etc/sysconfig/kernel isn't updated when convert XenPV guest with regular kernel installed

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1174551

"lstatnslist" and "lstatlist" don't give an error if the API is used wrongly

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1168223

koji spin-livecd cannot build a working live CD

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1165785

mount-loop command fails: mount failed: Unknown error -1

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1164708

set-label can only set <=127 bytes for btrfs and <=126 bytes for ntfs filesystem which not meet the help message. Also for ntfs it should give a warning message when the length >128 bytes

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1020216

libvirt fails to shut down domain: could not destroy libvirt domain: Requested operation is not valid: domain is not running

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1011907

mount-loop failed to setup loop device: No such file or directory

New features¶

New tools

virt-dib(1) is a secure and safe alternative to the OpenStack "diskimage-builder" tool. It is compatible with diskimage-builder elements. (Pino Toscano)

virt-get-kernel(1) extracts the kernel and ramdisk from a disk image. Previously this functionality was part of virt-builder(1), but the new tool is more featureful. (Pino Toscano)

New features in existing tools

virt-v2v(1) -i ova mode can now read a wider range of OVA files, and also unpacked files (directories).

virt-v2v now securely passes options to curl, so passwords, cookies and so on cannot be seen by users with shell access on the same machine.

virt-v2v has a new --password-file option to allow you to securely pass in a password, and to avoid an interactive prompt.

virt-v2v disables Windows autoreboot, making debugging conversion failures on Windows easier.

virt-v2v now comes with an extensive external test suite. See virt-v2v-test-harness(1).

virt-v2v allows virtio drivers to come from any location (Roman Kagan), and drivers can be read directly from the virtio ISO.

virt-v2v supports conversion of Windows ≥ 8. Note this is experimental, and possibly broken. Use with caution.

virt-v2v can now convert UEFI guests.

virt-p2v(1) adds a network configuration dialog.

virt-p2v now has "p2v.pre", "p2v.post" and "p2v.fail" triggers, allowing arbitrary scripts for preparing the host for conversion and tidying up post-conversion.

virt-p2v now uses the more advanced metacity window manager (instead of matchbox).

virt-sysprep(1) will remove "/var/spool/mail/username" for non-root accounts (Hu Tao).

virt-customize(1), virt-builder(1) and virt-sysprep have the following new options:

--commands-from-file

allow long lists of commands to be read from a file instead of from the command line (Pino Toscano)

--copy

copy files inside the guest (Maros Zatko)

--copy-in

copy host files recursively into the guest (Pino Toscano)

--move

move files inside the guest (Maros Zatko)

--ssh-inject

inject SSH keys into a guest (Pino Toscano)

--sm-attach

--sm-credentials

--sm-register

--sm-remove

--sm-unregister

register and unregister a guest from subscription-manager (Pino Toscano)

--touch

touch a file in the guest (Pino Toscano)

--truncate

--truncate-recursive

truncate files (Maros Zatko)

Improvements to virt-customize firstboot support. In particular, Windows firstboot should work as well as Linux (Roman Kagan).

virt-df(1) can now use PolicyKit, SASL and other authentication methods when getting the list of domains from libvirt.

Improvements to guestfish bash completion (Pino Toscano).

Bash completion now completes short options as well as long options (Pino Toscano).

guestfish(1) now displays a command synopsis if the number of parameters given to a command is wrong (Hu Tao).

virt-builder now supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions back to RHEL 3.

virt-builder supports SUSE guests using zypper (Cédric Bosdonnat).

Language bindings

The Java bindings now include validated Javadoc, and other improvements (Pino Toscano).

Multiple fixes and improvements to the PHP bindings (Pino Toscano).

Inspection

Inspection can now get icons from RHEL 7 and CentOS 7.

/etc/favicon.png is now allowed to be a symbolic link.

For RPM-based guests, inspection now returns RPM Epoch fields.

Debian packages now have separate Epoch and Version fields (Nikos Skalkotos).

OpenBSD detection added, FreeBSD and NetBSD added as separate "distros", and other BSD inspection improvements and bug fixes (Nikos Skalkotos).

CoreOS detection added (Nikos Skalkotos).

The package manager in Fedora ≥ 22 is "dnf".

ReactOS guests can be inspected (Maros Zatko).

Add support for UEFI guests.

Inspection now works when kernel modules are gzip or xz compressed (Pino Toscano).

Inspection now recognizes ppc64 and ppc64le guests (Maros Zatko).

Inspection lists the installed applications on Archlinux guests (Nikos Skalkotos).

Architectures and platforms

PPC64 (POWER7) and PPC64LE (POWER8) architectures are now much better supported, and should work out of the box.

For aarch64, we use AAVMF (an open source UEFI implementation based on OVMF) if available to run the appliance.

For armv7, we now use the -M virt machine type by default.

There is better support for compiling on non-Linux platforms (Pino Toscano, Margaret Lewicka).

Libguestfs should now work on MIPS 32 bit little endian ("mipsel"). I have not been able to try 64 bit or big endian.

Security¶

CVE-2014-8484

CVE-2014-8485

Libguestfs previously ran the strings(1) utility on untrusted files. Strings could parse BFD headers in an unsafe way, leading to possible arbitrary code execution. Libguestfs now runs strings with a flag to ensure it does not try to parse BFD headers. This could have led to exploitation of the libguestfs appliance, but since libguestfs further constrains the appliance through virtualization, SELinux and other techniques, it was unlikely to have caused any privilege escalation on the host.

XPath injection in virt-v2v

One possible XPath injection vulnerability was fixed in virt-v2v. This might have allowed a malicious guest which was being converted by virt-v2v to construct an arbitrary XPath expression which would have been evaluated on the host (by the libxml2 library linked to the virt-v2v binary). It is not clear what the effects of this might be.

For further information, see upstream commit https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/commit/6c6ce85f94c36803fe2db35a98db436bff0c14b0

Denial of service problems when using "qemu-img info"

When using the American Fuzzy Lop fuzzer ("afl-fuzz") on the "qemu-img info" command, Richard W.M. Jones found that certain files can cause the "qemu-img" program to use lots of memory and time (for example 6GB of heap and 14 seconds of CPU time on a fast Intel processor), and in some cases to crash. Since libguestfs may run "qemu-img info" on disk images to find out what they contain, this transitively could cause libguestfs to hang or consume lots of memory.

Libguestfs was modified so that it uses resource limits to limit the space and time used by "qemu-img info", to avoid this problem. If a malicious user tries to pass one of these disk images to libguestfs, "qemu-img" will crash and the crash is reported back to libguestfs callers as an error message.

API¶

New APIs

"guestfs_add_libvirt_dom"

This exposes a previously private API that allows you to pass a "virDomainPtr" object directly from libvirt to libguestfs.

"guestfs_blockdev_setra"

Adjust readahead parameter for devices. See "blockdev --setra" command.

"guestfs_btrfs_balance"

"guestfs_btrfs_balance_cancel"

"guestfs_btrfs_balance_pause"

"guestfs_btrfs_balance_resume"

"guestfs_btrfs_balance_status"

Balance support for Btrfs filesystems (Hu Tao).

"guestfs_btrfs_filesystem_defragment"

Filesystem defragmentation support for Btrfs filesystems (Hu Tao).

"guestfs_btrfs_image"

Create an image of a Btrfs filesystem (Chen Hanxiao)

"guestfs_btrfs_qgroup_assign"

"guestfs_btrfs_qgroup_create"

"guestfs_btrfs_qgroup_destroy"

"guestfs_btrfs_qgroup_limit"

"guestfs_btrfs_qgroup_remove"

"guestfs_btrfs_qgroup_show"

"guestfs_btrfs_quota_enable"

"guestfs_btrfs_quota_rescan"

Quote support for Btrfs filesystems (Hu Tao).

"guestfs_btrfs_rescue_chunk_recover"

Scan and recover the chunk tree in Btrfs filesystems (Hu Tao).

"guestfs_btrfs_rescue_super_recover"

Restore superblocks in Btrfs filesystems (Hu Tao).

"guestfs_btrfs_replace"

Replace a device in a Btrfs filesystem (Cao Jin).

"guestfs_btrfs_scrub"

"guestfs_btrfs_scrub_cancel"

"guestfs_btrfs_scrub_resume"

"guestfs_btrfs_scrub_status"

Scrub a Btrfs filesystem (Hu Tao).

"guestfs_btrfs_subvolume_get_default"

Get the default subvolume of a Btrfs filesystem (Hu Tao).

"guestfs_btrfs_subvolume_show"

List detailed information about the subvolume of a Btrfs filesystem (Hu Tao).

"guestfs_btrfstune_enable_extended_inode_refs"

"guestfs_btrfstune_enable_skinny_metadata_extent_refs"

"guestfs_btrfstune_seeding"

Various tuning parameters for Btrfs filesystems (Chen Hanxiao).

"guestfs_c_pointer"

Return the C pointer to the underlying "guestfs_h *". This allows interworking of libguestfs bindings with bindings from other libraries. For further information see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1075164

"guestfs_copy_in"

"guestfs_copy_out"

Flexible APIs for recursively copying directories of files between the host and guest filesystem. Previously these were available only as guestfish commands, but now any API users can call them (Pino Toscano).

"guestfs_part_get_gpt_guid"

"guestfs_part_set_gpt_guid"

Get and set the GPT per-partition GUID.

"guestfs_part_get_mbr_part_type"

Get MBR partition type (Chen Hanxiao).

"guestfs_set_uuid_random"

Set the UUID of a filesystem to a randomly generated value; supported filesystems currently are ext2/3/4, XFS, Btrfs, and swap partitions. (Chen Hanxiao).

Other API changes

"guestfs_disk_create" can now use VMDK files as backing files.

"guestfs_btrfs_subvolume_snapshot" takes extra optional parameters (all added by Hu Tao):

"ro"

for creating a read-only Btrfs snapshot

"qgroupid"

for adding the snapshot to a qgroup

"guestfs_btrfs_subvolume_create" can also take the optional "qgroupid" parameter (Hu Tao).

"guestfs_set_uuid" can set UUID of swap partitions, Btrfs (Hu Tao, Chen Hanxiao).

"guestfs_copy_device_to_file" and "guestfs_copy_file_to_file" have a new optional "append" parameter, allowing you to append to the output file instead of truncating it.

"guestfs_mkfs" has a new optional "label" parameter to set the initial label of the new filesystem (Pino Toscano).

"guestfs_set_label" and "guestfs_set_uuid" now set "ENOTSUP" as errno when there is no implemented support for the filesystem of the specified mountable (Chen Hanxiao).

Environment variables now let you write "LIBGUESTFS_DEBUG=true", "LIBGUESTFS_DEBUG=0" and so on.

All "guestfs_sfdisk*" APIs have been deprecated. Because sfdisk(8) was rewritten, incompatibly, upstream, we don't recommend using these APIs in future code. Use the "guestfs_part*" APIs as replacements.

APIs such as "guestfs_download" do not truncate /dev/stdout or /dev/stderr when writing to them, meaning that if you redirect stdout or stderr to a file, the file is no longer truncated.

Build changes¶

The daemon no longer uses its own separate copy of gnulib. Instead it shares a single copy with the library.

OCaml .annot files are now created, so IDEs and editors like emacs and vi can browse OCaml types in the source code.

Various fixes to allow different host/appliance architecture builds (Pino Toscano).

Automake is now used directly to build all the OCaml programs, instead of ad hoc Makefile rules. One side effect of this is to enable warnings in all the C code used by OCaml programs.

"-fno-strict-overflow" is used throughout the build to avoid dubious GCC optimizations.

Multiple cleanups to support GCC 5.

OCaml OUnit2 is needed to run some OCaml tests.

Creating a statically linked libguestfs.a should work again.

The src/api-support subdirectory and its scripts are no longer used. Instead we store in the generator/actions.ml when the API was added to libguestfs.

Internationalization¶

The translation service has changed from Transifex to Zanata.

Many more translations are available now, for both library and tools messages and documentation.

Internals¶

In all OCaml tools, there are now common "error", "warning", "info" functions, and common way to set and get the --quiet, -x (trace) and -v (verbose) flags, and colour highlighting used consistently.

"COMPILE_REGEXP" macros are used to simplify PCRE constructors and destructors.

In the generator, "Pointer" arguments have finally been implemented.

Internal identifiers no longer use double and triple underscores (eg. "guestfs___program_name"). These identifiers are invalid for C99 and C++ programs, although compilers would accept them.

The daemon no longer parses "guestfs_*" options from /proc/cmdline. Instead it only takes ordinary command line options. The appliance init script turns /proc/cmdline into daemon command line options.

The tests can now run the daemon as a "captive process", allowing it to be run directly on the host. The main advantage of this is we can run valgrind directly on the daemon during testing.

Bugs fixed¶

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1239053

virt-v2v error reporting when grub.conf cannot be parsed by Augeas

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1238053

v2v:Duplicate disk target set when convert guest with cdrom attached

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1237869

Virtio drivers are not installed for windows 2008 guests by virt-v2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1234351

virt-v2v Support for Fedora virtio-win drivers

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1232192

Virt-v2v gives an error on a blank disk: part_get_parttype: unknown signature, of the output: BYT;

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1229385

virt-p2v in kernel command line mode should power off the machine after conversion

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1229340

virt-p2v no GUI mode appends \n to the final command line parameter

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1229305

virt-sysprep at cleanup deletes /var/spool/at/.SEQ which results in failing at

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1226794

"Doing conversion……" still shows after cancel the conversion from virt-p2v client

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1215042

Memory leak in virNetSocketNewConnectUNIX

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1213324

virt-v2v: warning: unknown guest operating system: windows windows 6.3 when converting win8,win8.1,win2012,win2012R2 to rhev

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1213247

virt tools should print the same format of version string

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1212808

RFE: virt-builder --touch

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1212807

virt-builder --selinux-relabel flag fails on cross-architecture builds

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1212680

RFE: virt-inspector xpath query should output a neat format of the query element

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1212152

virt-builder firstboot-command fails: File name too long

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1211996

virt-inspector gives incorrect arch (ppc64) for ppc64le guest

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1203817

RFE: virt-customize --move and --copy

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1201526

index-parser can't parse systemd mount files properly

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1196101

virt-builder --upload option doesn't work to a FAT partition

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1196100

virt-builder -x option on its own does not enable tracing

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1195204

`virt-builder` should create $HOME/.cache directory if it already doesn't exist

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1193237

Virt-builder fingerprint is required even when no check desired

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1189284

virt-resize should preserve GPT partition UUIDs, else EFI guests become unbootable

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1188866

Performance regression in virt-builder when uncompressing image

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1186800

virt-v2v should support gzip format ova as input

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1185561

virt-sparsify should ignore read-only LVs

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1182463

"mknod-b", "mknod-c", and "mkfifo" do not strip non-permissions bits from "mode"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1176493

virt-v2v ignores sound device when convert xen guest to local kvm

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1175676

Typo error in 'help ping-daemon'

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1175196

"parse-environment" and "parse-environment-list" fail to parse "LIBGUESTFS_TRACE = 0"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1175035

"is-blockdev"/"is-blockdev-opts" fail to detect "/dev/sda"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1174280

RFE: Allow v2v conversion of Oracle Linux 5.8 VMware VM

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1174200

New virt-v2v failure: CURL: Error opening file: NSS: client certificate not found (nickname not specified): Invalid argument

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1174123

Graphics password disappear after conversion of virt-v2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1174073

The listen address for vnc is changed after conversion by virt-v2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1171666

inspection thinks EFI partition is a separate operating system

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1171130

virt-v2v conversion of RHEL 3 guest fails with: All of your loopback devices are in use

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1170685

Conversion of RHEL 4 guest fails: rpm -ql 1:kernel-utils-2.4-23.el4: virt-v2v: error: libguestfs error: command_lines:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1170073

virt-v2v picks debug kernels over non-debug kernels when versions are equal

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1169045

virt-sparsify: libguestfs error: qemu-img info: 'virtual-size' is not representable as a 64 bit integer

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1169015

virt-resize --expand fails on ubuntu-14.04.img image (regression)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1168144

warning: fstrim: fstrim: /sysroot/: FITRIM ioctl failed: Operation not supported (ignored) when convert win2003 guest from xen server

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1167921

p2v: No Network Connection dialog

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1167774

virt-p2v fails with error:"nbd.c:nbd_receive_negotiate():L501: read failed"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1167623

Remove "If reporting bugs, run virt-v2v with debugging enabled .." message when running virt-p2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1167601

"Conversion was successful" pop out even virt-p2v fails

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1167302

virt-v2v: warning: ova hard disk has no parent controller when convert from a ova file

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1166618

virt-resize should give out the detail warning info to let customers know what's going wrong

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1165975

File "/boot/grub2/device.map" showing is not right after converting a rhel7 guest from esx server

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1165785

mount-loop command fails: mount failed: Unknown error -1

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1165569

Disable "cancel conversion" button after virt-p2v conversion finished

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1165564

Provide Reboot/Shutdown button after virt-p2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1164853

Booting in qemu found no volume groups and failed checking the filesystems

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1164732

The description of 'help append' is not accurately, it add the kernel options to libguestfs appliance not the guest kernel

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1164697

typo errors in man pages

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1164619

Inspect-get-icon failed on RHEL7 guest

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1162966

xfs should also give a warning out to let customer know the limitation

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1161575

Failed to import guest with "rtl8139" nic to openstack server after converted by v2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1159651

virt-sysprep firstboot script is not deleted if it reboot a RHEL 7 guest

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1159258

esx win2008 32 bit guest fail to load after conversion because the firmware isn't ACPI compatible

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1159016

libvirt backend does not set RBD password

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1158526

Use password file instead of process interaction

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1157679

virt-p2v-make-disk should add firmwares

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1156449

libguestfs FTBFS on f21 ppc64le

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1156301

virt-inspector support adding a remote disk, but in its man page -a URI / --add URI is missing

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1155121

Virt-v2v will fail when using relative path for -i ova

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1153844

Redundancy whitespace at the end of directory name when use <TAB> to complete the directory name in guestfish with a xfs filesystem in guest

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1153589

virt-v2v will hang when converting esx guest before disk copy phase

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1152998

virt-v2v / qemu-img fails on ova image

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1151910

virt-ls should remove '/' in the output when specify the directory name as /etc/

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1151900

Should also add a field for directory files when run virt-ls with --csv option

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1151033

virt-v2v conversions from VMware vCenter server run slowly

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1146832

virt-v2v fail to convert guest with disk type volume

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1146007

Input/output error during conversion of esx guest.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1135585

[RFE] virt-builder should support copying in a directory/list of files

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1089566

[abrt] livecd-tools: kickstart.py:276:apply:IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/run/media/jones/2tp001data/createlive/temp/imgcreate-_dX8Us/install_root/etc/rpm/macros.imgcreate'

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1079625

virt-sparsify fails if a btrfs filesystem contains readonly snapshots

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1075164

RFE: allow passing in a pre-opened libvirt connection from python

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/912499

Security context on image file gets reset

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/889082

[RFE] virt-v2v should check whether guest with same name exist on target first then transfer the disk

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/855059

RFE: virt-p2v: display more information about network devices such as topology, bonding, etc.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/823758

p2v client should have largest number restrictions for CPU and Memory settings

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/709327

hivex cannot read registry hives from ReactOS

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/709326

virt-inspector cannot detect ReactOS

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/119673

installation via NFS doesn't seem to work

New features¶

Tools

virt-v2v(1) and virt-p2v(1) are tools for converting from foreign hypervisors (such as VMware or Xen) or physical machines, to KVM. These tools were previously a separate project. The code for both tools has been integrated into the libguestfs tree. As part of the refactoring, virt-p2v has been rewritten (from Ruby, now C), and virt-v2v now uses several modern features of qemu which make it run many times faster than before. virt-v2v(1) can import from: VMware vCenter, VMware OVA files, local disk files, libvirt, RHEL 5 Xen. It can output to: oVirt or Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV-M), OpenStack Glance, libvirt, qemu, local disk files.

virt-log(1) is a new tool for listing log files from guests. It supports a variety of guests including Linux traditional, Linux using journal, and Windows event log.

virt-builder(1) has a new "--machine-readable" option to make it simpler to consume virt-builder from other programs.

New virt-builder(1) and virt-customize(1) --chmod option.

virt-sysprep(1) will now remove: systemd journals, anaconda logs, lightdm logs, debian-installer files, apt logs, exim logs, ConsoleKit logs, firewalld logs, grubby logs, proftpd logs, libvirt/libxml logs, and several other log files. The virt-sysprep "user-account" operation is now able to remove or keep particular user accounts. (Pino Toscano).

New guestmount(1) --fd option, allowing you to run guestmount captive under another process.

virt-sparsify(1) has a new --tmp option allowing you to precisely control where temporary files are stored.

virt-sparsify(1) can now write to a block device.

virt-customize(1) and virt-sysprep(1) now support adding firstboot scripts to Windows guests.

virt-cat(1), virt-edit(1), virt-ls(1) now support the -m option, allowing you to override automatic inspection of guests and instead specify where to mount partitions (Pino Toscano).

The virt tools now have coloured output: green for OK, red for errors, blue for warnings.

Language bindings

You can build a Python distribution using "make -C python sdist"

Ruby bindings have switched from "Test::Unit" to "MiniTest".

The Java bindings are now compatible with OpenJDK 8 (Pino Toscano).

Inspection

Oracle Linux is returned as "oraclelinux" (Nikos Skalkotos).

Linux guests which do not have /etc/fstab can now be handled (Pino Toscano).

Minix is returned as "minix" (Pino Toscano).

Architectures

Aarch64 (64 bit ARM) support has been added.

Inspection and the "guestfs_file_architecture" call can now recognize arm (32 bit) and aarch64 guests.

Security¶

CVE-2014-0191 Network usage and entity resolution in XML parsing

Libguestfs previously used unsafe libxml2 APIs for parsing libvirt XML. These APIs defaulted to allowing network connections to be made when certain XML documents were presented. Using a malformed XML document it was also possible to exhaust all CPU, memory or file descriptors on the machine.

Since the libvirt XML comes from a trusted source (the libvirt daemon) it is not thought that this could have been exploitable.

This was fixed in libguestfs ≥ 1.27.9 and the fix was backported to stable versions ≥ 1.26.2, ≥ 1.24.9, ≥ 1.22.10 and ≥ 1.20.13. (Thanks: Dan Berrange, Pino Toscano).

Shellshock (bash CVE-2014-6271)

This bash bug indirectly affects libguestfs. For more information see: https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2014-September/msg00252.html

API¶

New APIs

"guestfs_clear_backend_setting"

"guestfs_get_backend_setting"

"guestfs_set_backend_setting"

Use these APIs to set individual backend settings.

"guestfs_cpio_out"

Convert a directory within the disk image to cpio format.

"guestfs_journal_get_realtime_usec"

Fetch precise journal times, see sd_journal_get_realtime_usec(3).

"guestfs_lstatns"

"guestfs_lstatnslist"

"guestfs_statns"

Enhanced versions of "guestfs_lstat", "guestfs_lstatlist", "guestfs_stat" which return nanosecond timestamps.

Build changes¶

Libguestfs can now be built with qemu 2.x.

Add support for packaging the appliance on Mageia (Joseph Wang, Thierry Vignaud).

Augeas is now a required dependency.

Flex and bison are now required dependencies.

Internals¶

User-Mode Linux (UML) is no longer a supported backend (although still available). It will be supported again once someone steps in and fixes various regressions and brokenness in the UML (Linux) kernel.

You can now connect gdb to qemu by specifying "LIBGUESTFS_BACKEND_SETTINGS=gdb"

Serial BIOS (sgabios) is now used by the libvirt backend (on x86 only) so that we see early BIOS messages.

For the OCaml virt tools, exceptions are now handled and printed by a common function.

A GCC warning about large stack frames is now enabled by default. Several places that used large arrays and structures on the stack have been fixed.

There is now a test for booting the appliance repeatedly. Useful for finding kernel leaks. See: tests/qemu/qemu-boot.c

There is a test for testing the speed of various qemu features such as virtio-serial uploads and block device writes. See: tests/qemu/qemu-speed-test.c

GCC warnings are now enabled for OCaml-C bindings in the OCaml virt tools.

The code for editing files used by virt-edit(1), guestfish(1) "edit" command, virt-customize(1) --edit option and more is now shared between all these utilities (thanks Pino Toscano).

The FUSE tests were rewritten in C to ensure finer control over how system calls are tested.

The update-bugs.sh script has been fixed so it should no longer create an empty "BUGS" file if the Bugzilla server is unavailable.

The virt-resize(1) tests now use a stochastic method to ensure much deeper and broader testing.

When the network is enabled, the appliance now uses DHCP to acquire an IP address.

If libvirt is being used then the appliance will connect to "virbr0" (can be overridden by setting "LIBGUESTFS_BACKEND_SETTINGS=network_bridge=<some_bridge>"). This enables full-featured network connections, with working ICMP, ping and so on.

Bugs fixed¶

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1153515

empty (but set) LIBGUESTFS_BACKEND prints libguestfs: error: invalid backend:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1151766

libguestfs-bash-completion package contains file /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/virt-log, but no _virt_log() function in that file

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1151738

typo error in man page of virt-edit

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1151033

virt-v2v conversions from VMware vCenter server run slowly

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1150880

virt-v2v: warning: display <graphics type='sdl'> was ignored when converting rhel5 guest with sdl graphics

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1150867

'copy-file-to-file /src /dest' create file /dest even if command 'copy-file-to-file /src /dest' failed

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1150815

Can not find "RECURSIVE LONG LISTING" in 'man virt-diff'

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1150701

virt-v2v does not fstrim data disks and non-mounted filesystems

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1150475

Exporting 2+ disk guest to RHEV, only one disk shows after import

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1148355

virt-filesystems: incorrect LVM vg name when listing Fedora 21 Alpha Atomic image filesystems

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1148072

Option missing --no-selinux-relabel

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1148012

RFE: Allow qemu-bridge-helper to be used to implement guestfs_set_network

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1146815

virt-v2v prints warning: /files/etc/fstab/8/spec references unknown device "cdrom"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1146275

regression setting root password with virt-builder/virt-customize

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1146017

virt-v2v -v -x during windows guest conversion will hang at hivex: hivex_open: used block id ……

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1145995

Improve the error info when converting windows guest with unclean file system

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1145916

virt-v2v fails to convert win7 guest

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1144891

RFE: stat calls do not return nanosecond timestamps

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1144766

futimens() is a no-op via guestmount

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1144201

guestfish can not restore terminal's output colour when exit guestfish, if the terminal's background colour is black then it will make a inconvenient

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1143949

virt-customize option '--password-crypto' do not work

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1143887

Warning shows when converting guests to rhev:chown: changing ownership of ‘/tmp/v2v.u48xag/*.ovf’: Invalid argument

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1143883

warning shows when converting rhel7 guest:virt-v2v:could not update grub2 console: aug_get: no matching node (ignored)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1143866

virt-v2v fails with error: cannot open Packages index using db5

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1142416

part-get-name give 'libguestfs: error: part_get_name: parted does not support the machine output (-m)' error message when run 'part-get-name /dev/sda 1'

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1142186

virt-sysprep option '--mount-options' don't work well

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1142158

Illegal command 'part-get-name /dev/sda1 1' cause libguestfs appliance crashed

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1142004

virt-v2v prints warning:WARNING:/files/boot/grub/device.map references unknown device "xvda"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1141723

virt-v2v: error: disk sda has no defined format shows when converting xen hvm guest

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1141680

[RFE] virt-v2 should support convert a domain with using domain's UUID instead of domain name

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1141631

[RFE] virt-v2 should support convert a guest to a dir-pool with using pool's uuid

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1141157

virt-sysprep option '--user-accounts' don't work well

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1141145

virt-v2v fails to convert xen pv guests.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1141113

virt-v2v fails to convert esx guests

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1140946

qemu-img shows error message for backing file twice

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1140894

No error messages output if append '--format qcow2' after '-a guest.img', guest.img is a raw format image file

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1140547

virt-builder option '--format' don't work well

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1140156

RFE: Export to RHEV data domain

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1140050

No error shows when multiple conflicting options used with virt-v2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1139973

Improve the error info when converting xen guest with no passwordless SSH access configured

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1139543

Improve the error info when converting guest with no space left

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1138586

No error shows when converting running guest with virt-v2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1138184

virt-v2v will fail when converting guests with initramfs-*kdump.img under /boot

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1138182

xen guest will be kernel panic after converted by virt-v2v

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1130189

Annoying message about permissions of /dev/kvm

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1123007

libguestfs 'direct' backend should close file descriptors before exec-ing qemu to avoid leaking !O_CLOEXEC fds

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1122557

virt-sparsify overwrites block devices if used as output files

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1113156

Empty fstab breaks libguestfs inspection

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1111662

Guestfs.Error("vgchange_uuid_all: Volume group has active logical volumes")

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1109174

virt-win-reg manual page is corrupted

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1106548

root gets an error accessing to a non-root dir on a snapshot guestmount VMDK img

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1103877

These APIs also need to add to `guestfish -h` command list

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1102448

mageia package list is incorrect

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1102447

libguestfs 1.27.13 does not build due to libxml library order

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1100498

RFE: non-polling mechanism to detect guestmount --no-fork readiness

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1099490

scrub-file can't handle link file

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1099284

typo errors in man pages

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1098718

RFE: virt-builder aliases

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1096465

virt-builder "proxy=off" setting doesn't turn off the proxy for downloads

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1094746

virt-sparsify man failes to mention what happens to snapshots within a qcow2 image (they are discarded)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1092753

virt-builder: If several repos contain the same os-version images, then they are duplicated in -l output

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1091803

tar-in-opts execute failed that cause libguestfs appliance crashed

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1088424

virt-resize: libguestfs error: part_set_name: parted: /dev/sdb: Error during translation: Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1088262

virt-builder cannot write to a block device

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1085029

Ruby tests fail with latest Ruby

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1079210

virt-sparsify --in-place cannot sparsify as much as it should

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1079182

virt-df cannot report used disk space of windows guest when updated to 6.5

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1077817

virt-builder error: "syntax error at line 3: syntax error"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1056290

virt-sparsify overwrites block devices if used as output files

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/812970

virt-rescue cannot set ≥<rescue> prompt, on Ubuntu 12.04

New features¶

Tools

virt-customize(1) is a new tool for customizing virtual machine disk images. It lets you install packages, edit configuration files, run scripts, set passwords and so on. virt-builder(1) and virt-sysprep(1) use virt-customize, and command line options across all these tools are now identical.

virt-diff(1) is a new tool for showing the differences between the filesystems of two virtual machines. It is mainly useful when showing what files have been changed between snapshots.

virt-builder(1) has been greatly enhanced. There are many more ways to customize the virtual machine. It can pull templates from multiple repositories. A parallelized internal xzcat implementation speeds up template decompression. Virt-builder uses an optimizing planner to choose the fastest way to build the VM. It is now easier to use virt-builder from other programs. Internationalization support has been added to metadata. More efficient SELinux relabelling of files. Can build guests for multiple architectures. Error messages have been improved. (Pino Toscano)

virt-sparsify(1) has a new --in-place option. This sparsifies an image in place (without copying it) and is also much faster. (Lots of help provided by Paolo Bonzini)

virt-sysprep(1) can delete and scrub files under user control. You can lock user accounts or set random passwords on accounts. Can remove more log files. Can unsubscribe a guest from Red Hat Subscription Manager. New flexible way to enable and disable operations. (Wanlong Gao, Pino Toscano)

virt-win-reg(1) allows you to use URIs to specify remote disk images.

virt-format(1) can now pass the extra space that it recovers back to the host.

guestfish(1) has additional environment variables to give fine control over the "><fs>" prompt. Guestfish reads its (rarely used) configuration file in a different order now so that local settings override global settings. (Pino Toscano)

virt-make-fs(1) was rewritten in C, but is unchanged in terms of functionality and command line usage.

Language bindings

The OCaml bindings have a new "Guestfs.Errno" module, used to check the error number returned by "Guestfs.last_errno".

PHP tests now work. (Pino Toscano)

Inspection

Inspection can recognize Debian live images.

Architectures

ARMv7 (32 bit) now supports KVM acceleration.

Aarch64 (ARM 64 bit) is supported, but the appliance part does not work yet.

PPC64 support has been fixed and enhanced.

Security¶

Denial of service when inspecting disk images with corrupt btrfs volumes

It was possible to crash libguestfs (and programs that use libguestfs as a library) by presenting a disk image containing a corrupt btrfs volume.

This was caused by a NULL pointer dereference causing a denial of service, and is not thought to be exploitable any further.

See commit d70ceb4cbea165c960710576efac5a5716055486 for the fix. This fix is included in libguestfs stable branches ≥ 1.26.0, ≥ 1.24.6 and ≥ 1.22.8, and also in RHEL ≥ 7.0. Earlier versions of libguestfs are not vulnerable.

Better generation of random root passwords and random seeds

When generating random root passwords and random seeds, two bugs were fixed which are possibly security related. Firstly we no longer read excessive bytes from /dev/urandom (most of which were just thrown away). Secondly we changed the code to avoid modulo bias. These issues were not thought to be exploitable. (Both changes suggested by Edwin Török)

API¶

GUID parameters are now validated when they are passed to API calls, whereas previously you could have passed any string. (Pino Toscano)

New APIs

"guestfs_add_drive_opts": new "discard" parameter

The new "discard" parameter allows fine-grained control over discard/trim support for a particular disk. This allows the host file to become more sparse (or thin-provisioned) when you delete files or issue the "guestfs_fstrim" API call.

"guestfs_add_domain": new parameters: "cachemode", "discard"

These parameters are passed through when adding the domain's disks.

"guestfs_blkdiscard"

Discard all blocks on a guestfs device. Combined with the "discard" parameter above, this makes the host file sparse.

"guestfs_blkdiscardzeroes"

Test if discarded blocks read back as zeroes.

"guestfs_compare_*"

"guestfs_copy_*"

For each struct returned through the API, libguestfs now generates "guestfs_compare_*" and "guestfs_copy_*" functions to allow you to compare and copy structs.

"guestfs_copy_attributes"

Copy attributes (like permissions, xattrs, ownership) from one file to another. (Pino Toscano)

"guestfs_disk_create"

A flexible API for creating empty disk images from scratch. This avoids the need to call out to external programs like qemu-img(1).

"guestfs_get_backend_settings"

"guestfs_set_backend_settings"

Per-backend settings (can also be set via the environment variable "LIBGUESTFS_BACKEND_SETTINGS"). The main use for this is forcing TCG mode in the qemu-based backends, for example:

 export LIBGUESTFS_BACKEND=direct
 export LIBGUESTFS_BACKEND_SETTINGS=force_tcg
    

"guestfs_part_get_name"

Get the label or name of a partition (for GPT disk images).

Build changes¶

The following extra packages are required to build libguestfs 1.26:

supermin ≥ 5

Supermin version 5 is required to build this version of libguestfs.

flex, bison

Virt-builder now uses a real parser to parse its metadata file, so these tools are required.

xz

This is now a required build dependency, where previously it was (in theory) optional.

Internals¶

PO message extraction rewritten to be more robust. (Pino Toscano)

"podwrapper" gives an error if the --insert or --verbatim argument pattern is not found.

Libguestfs now passes the qemu -enable-fips option to enable FIPS, if qemu supports it.

"./configure --without-qemu" can be used if you don't want to specify a default hypervisor.

Copy-on-write [COW] overlays, used for example for read-only drives, are now created through an internal backend API (".create_cow_overlay").

Libvirt backend uses some funky C macros to generate XML. These are simpler and safer.

The ChangeLog file format has changed. It is now just the same as "git log", instead of using a custom format.

Appliance start-up has changed:

• The libguestfs appliance now initializes LVM the same way as it is done on physical machines.
• The libguestfs appliance does not write an empty string to /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug when starting up.

  Note that you must configure your kernel to have "CONFIG_UEVENT_HELPER_PATH=""" otherwise you will get strange LVM errors (this applies as much to any Linux machine, not just libguestfs). (Peter Rajnoha)

Libguestfs can now be built on arches that have ocamlc(1) but not ocamlopt(1). (Hilko Bengen, Olaf Hering)

You cannot use "./configure --disable-daemon --enable-appliance". It made no sense anyway. Now it is expressly forbidden by the configure script.

The packagelist file uses "m4" for macro expansion instead of "cpp".

Bugs fixed¶

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1073906

java bindings inspect_list_applications2 throws java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1063374

[RFE] enable subscription manager clean or unregister operation to sysprep

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1060404

virt-resize does not preserve GPT partition names

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1057504

mount-local should give a clearer error if root is not mounted

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1056290

virt-sparsify overwrites block devices if used as output files

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1055452

libguestfs: error: invalid backend: appliance

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1054761

guestfs_pvs prints "unknown device" if a physical volume is missing

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1053847

Recommended default clock/timer settings

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1046509

ruby-libguestfs throws "expecting 0 or 1 arguments" on Guestfs::Guestfs.new

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1045450

Cannot inspect cirros 0.3.1 disk image fully

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1045033

LIBVIRT_DEFAULT_URI=qemu:///system breaks libguestfs

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1044585

virt-builder network (eg. --install) doesn't work if resolv.conf sets nameserver 127.0.0.1

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1044014

When SSSD is installed, libvirt configuration requires authentication, but not clear to user

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1039995

virt-make-fs fails making fat/vfat whole disk: Device partition expected, not making filesystem on entire device '/dev/sda' (use -I to override)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1039540

virt-sysprep to delete more logfiles

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1033207

RFE: libguestfs inspection does not recognize Free4NAS live CD

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1028660

RFE: virt-sysprep/virt-builder should have an option to lock a user account

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1026688

libguestfs fails examining libvirt guest with ceph drives: rbd: image name must begin with a '/'

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1022431

virt-builder fails if $HOME/.cache doesn't exist

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1022184

libguestfs: do not use versioned jar file

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1020806

All libguestfs LVM operations fail on Debian/Ubuntu

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1008417

Need update helpout of part-set-gpt-type

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/953907

virt-sysprep does not correctly set the hostname on Debian/Ubuntu

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/923355

guestfish prints literal "\n" in error messages

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/660687

guestmount: "touch" command fails: touch: setting times of `timestamp': Invalid argument

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/593511

[RFE] function to get partition name

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/563450

list-devices returns devices of different types out of order

New features¶

User-Mode Linux (UML) can be used as an alternative backend (ie. instead of KVM). This improves performance especially when using libguestfs inside a VM (eg. in the cloud). UML is supported as a first-class backend. See "USER-MODE LINUX BACKEND" in guestfs(3) for how to use this.

ARM (32 bit) and PPC64 are now fully supported.

Tools

virt-builder(1) is a new tool for building virtual machine images. It lets you rapidly and securely create guests and customize them.

New virt-sysprep(1) operations: Remove files in /tmp and /var/tmp. Remove RPM database files. Change root and user passwords. More log files are removed. New operations which are not enabled by default: Create random UUIDs for filesystems. Reset firewall rules. (Wanlong Gao)

virt-resize(1) and virt-sysprep can now use URIs to specify a remote disk.

Use "guestfish -N filename=type" to create a named disk image (instead of the default test1.img etc).

virt-sparsify(1) now tests if there is enough disk space to complete the operation, instead of possibly running out of space half way through.

virt-format(1) and virt-make-fs(1): new --label option for setting filesystem label.

virt-resize --no-sparse flag can be used to resize on to partitions and other targets that are not zeroed.

Language bindings

New bindings for the Go programming language.

API

Support for the systemd journal.

"guestfs_add_drive_opts" can now control the qemu caching mode through a new "cachemode" parameter. You can select improved performance for temporary drives, or safety.

"guestfs_set_label" now works for XFS and btrfs.

New GUESTFS_EVENT_WARNING event for warning messages.

Inspection

Better inspection of SUSE guests (Olaf Hering).

Better support for non-standard Windows %systemroot% (Matthew Booth).

Enhanced error reporting for Augeas errors.

Security¶

CVE-2013-2124

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=968306

A denial of service was possible when inspecting certain guests. The fix has been backported to 1.20 and 1.22 branches.

CVE-2013-4419

https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2013-October/msg00031.html

Fix insecure temporary directory handling for remote guestfish. The fix has been backported to 1.20 and 1.22 branches.

New APIs¶

 add-drive-scratch: Add a temporary scratch drive
 aug-label
 aug-setm
 journal-open: Systemd journal support
 journal-close
 journal-next
 journal-skip
 journal-get
 journal-get-data-threshold
 journal-set-data-threshold
 remount: Allow rw flag to be adjusted on mounted filesystems
 set-uuid: Set UUID of filesystem

"is-file", "is-dir", "is-blockdev", "is-chardev", "is-fifo", "is-socket" APIs now have an extra "followsymlinks" flag.

"add-drive" has a new "cachemode" parameter.

Build changes¶

The following packages are required to build libguestfs 1.24:

Augeas ≥ 1.0.0

The following optional packages may be added to enhance functionality but are not required:

sd-journal

To read journal files from guests which use that.

url_mkcow

For UML backend.

curl

gpg

xz

For virt-builder.

golang ≥ 1.1.1

For Go language bindings.

Internals¶

New "make check-*" rules replace "make extra-tests". See "make help" and guestfs(3) for details.

Perl code can now be valgrinded.

Inspection code is now fuzz-tested.

"make" no longer recurses into the generator directory in every other directory. This reduces the overhead of builds considerably.

Additional tests for Augeas, hivex.

Add a launch timeout of 20 minutes waiting for the appliance to start up.

Add a timeout (4 hours) to all tests so we can catch the case where qemu or other components hang.

Use kvmclock and "-cpu host". This improves clock stability and overall performance.

"./configure --enable-packet-dump" mode is fixed.

"./configure --enable-valgrind-daemon" mode has been rewritten. It is now feasible for developers to keep this flag enabled at all times.

Backends have been refactored to be modular (although they are not actually loadable modules).

When enabled, the network now uses resolver configuration (ie. /etc/resolv.conf) from the host.

Bugs fixed¶

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1019889

libguestfs-tools.conf should have a man page

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1018149

valgrind errors in btrfs_subvolume_list

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1002032

mke2fs can't return the correct filesystem type when blockscount is less than 2048 for ext3

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1001876

Update "rsync-out" helpout for using wildcard

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1001875

Argument 'excludes' of tar-out does not work

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1000428

virt-format uses wrong partition type for vfat filesystems

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1000121

'sh' command before mount causes daemon to segfault

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/998513

guestfish does not work when you mix --remote and --add options

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/998482

guestfish remote prints "libguestfs: error: waitpid (qemu): No child processes"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/995711

list-filesystems command fails if there are no block devices

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/994517

cache=none/O_DIRECT workaround doesn't work for images with backing files

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/989356

cap-get-file will return error if the file has not be set capabilities

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/986877

RFE: Implement set-uuid command

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/986875

RFE: Implement set-label for xfs

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/985269

Can't set acl value for a specified user with 'acl-set-file'

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/983218

libguestfs double free when kernel link fails during launch

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/981715

Make xfs filesystem failed with specified blocksize, gives "unknown option -b" error

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/981683

"hivex-commit" should fail with a relative path

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/981663

disk-format "qemu-img info: JSON parse error" when target file does not exist

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/978302

mke2fs-J should give a meaningful error when specified type is anything except 'ext{2,3,4}'

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/975797

Specifying virtio interface ('iface' parameter) breaks the direct backend - libguestfs hangs

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/975753

"virt-resize --expand" and "virt-resize --resize" outputs error message for Win2008 32bit OS

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/975412

inspection: Augeas expressions are broken with augeas >= 0.10

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/974904

virt-resize --expand fails on Ubuntu Cloud Image

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/974489

Regression: Fedora inspection broken by change from guestfs_exists to guestfs_is_file

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/972775

txz-out command produces a bzip2-compressed file (should be xz-compressed)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/969845

upload to a directory occasionally hangs instead of failing

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/968875

virt-sysprep should support URL-type arguments

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/624334

blockdev-setbsz succeeds, but does not affect blockdev-getbsz

New features¶

API

Remote access to disks:

• Network Block Device (nbd)
• Secure Shell (ssh)
• HTTP and HTTPS
• FTP and FTPS
• iSCSI
• Gluster
• Ceph/rbd (Mike Kelly)
• Sheepdog
• TFTP

The SYSLINUX and EXTLINUX bootloaders can now be installed in disk images using the API.

Inspection can now handle filesystems such as btrfs where subvolumes are separately mountable (Matthew Booth).

"Attach methods" are now known as "backends". Compatibility with existing code is preserved.

Filenames can contain ':', as long as newer QEMU is being used.

Tools

Virt-alignment-scan and virt-df scan multiple guests in parallel.

Guestmount now passes errno accurately back to userspace in almost all cases.

Guestfish and other tools can now use a URI-like syntax to access remote disks, eg:

 guestfish -a ssh://example.com/path/to/disk.img

Guestfish and guestmount now allow you to specify the filesystem type when mounting, which is more secure (Dave Vasilevsky).

Guestfish is now the "guest filesystem shell".

Guestfish allows only 1 "true" "t" "yes" "y" "on" 0 "false" "f" "no" "n" "off" for boolean values (case insensitive), and gives an error for all other strings.

New tool "guestunmount" for unmounting FUSE filesystems safely.

"guestmount --no-fork" flag prevents guestmount from daemonizing.

Virt-resize now uses sparse copies by default, saving considerable space for guests which are mostly empty.

Bash tab completion has been rewritten and can now handle most tools, and correctly tab-complete "--long" options. In addition, bash completion scripts are loaded on demand.

Language bindings

The Java API now supports events.

The Python object now inherits from the "object" base class.

Python methods which previously returned lists of tuples can now be made to return a Python dict. For backwards compatibility, you have to enable this by using the constructor option "guestfs.GuestFS (python_return_dict=True)".

The PHP bindings are now tested properly, and have had multiple fixes.

The long-deprecated Perl "Sys::Guestfs::Lib" library has been removed. https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2013-April/msg00001.html

Examples

New example program showing how to enable debugging and capture log messages.

Other

Distributors can add arbitrary extra packages to the appliance by doing:

 ./configure --with-extra-packages="list of package names"

Distributors can use:

 ./configure --with-supermin-extra-options="..."

to add arbitrary extra options to supermin.

Security¶

No security issues were found in this release.

New APIs¶

 cp-r
 extlinux
 feature-available
 get-program
 is-whole-device
 part-get-gpt-type
 part-set-gpt-type
 rename
 set-program
 syslinux

C only:

 guestfs_event_to_string

Internals¶

The febootstrap tool has now been renamed to "supermin". Libguestfs can use either, but now prefers "supermin". http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/supermin/

libxml2 is required to build libguestfs.

The hivexregedit program (from hivex) is required to build from git.

Internal functions can no longer be used unless the caller defines "-DGUESTFS_PRIVATE=1".

Enable C compiler warnings in Python, Ruby bindings.

Fail early and clearly if libvirt does not support qemu/KVM (eg. if default libvirt connection is to Xen).

"make print-subdirs" rule, useful for selectively running tests.

Multiple fixes to allow separated (sourcedir != builddir) builds.

Multiple fixes to Haskell bindings.

"ln" and "ln-f" APIs now capture "errno" correctly.

Language binding tests use (mostly) a standard numbering scheme and aim to test the same range of features in each language. Also the number of launches required has been reduced so these tests should run much more quickly.

Library code internally uses GCC "__attribute__((cleanup))" (if available) to simplify memory allocation.

Internal header files have been reorganized. See the comments in src/guestfs-internal*.h

Internal code shared between the library and certain tools is now located in a static "libutils" library.

Almost all subdirectories can now use parallel builds, although note that the top-level directories still build in series.

Use of "PATH_MAX" and "NAME_MAX" has been eliminated from the code.

The Java API now requires JVM ≥ 1.6.

Force use of "serial-tests" with automake ≥ 1.12.

Use of sockets in the library protocol layer is abstracted, allowing other non-POSIX layers to be added in future (see src/conn-socket.c).

"qemu-img info --output json" is used if available, for more secure parsing of the output of this command.

Distros can now use "make INSTALLDIRS=vendor install" to place Ruby bindings in vendordir. This eliminates a non-upstream patch carried by both Fedora and Debian.

Valgrind log files are now written to tmp/valgrind-DATE-PID.log

"make clean" cleans the local "tmp/" directory.

The C API tests have been rewritten using a more flexible generator language that allows arbitrary C code to be executing during tests.

Bugs fixed¶

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/961812

Segfault in inspect-fs.c in mountable code

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/957772

tar-out and base64-out quoting error

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/957380

libguestfs: error: btrfsvol:/dev/sda2/root: root device not found: only call this function with a root device previously returned by guestfs_inspect_os

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/948324

inspection fails if libosinfo is not installed

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/928995

file on zero-sized file now produces "empty " instead of "empty"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/921292

qemu: could not open disk image /tmp/.../snapshot1: Permission denied

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/921040

"error: external command failed, see earlier error messages" message needs to change

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/920225

libguestfs should use --output json (if supported) to safely parse the output of qemu-img command

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/916780

feature request: guestmount --with-cleanup-pipefd

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/914934

oom-killer kills guestfsd when tar-in a lot of data

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/914931

FileIn commands cause segfault if appliance dies during the file copy in

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/913145

Misc leaks in virNetClientProgramCall in libvirt 1.0.2

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/912499

Security context on image file gets reset

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/909836

libguestfs-test-tool --qemu segfaults

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/909624

Unexpected non-tail recursion in recv_from_daemon results in stack overflow in very long-running API calls that send progress messages

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/908322

virt-tar fails on non-existent directory names "error in chunked encoding at /home/rjones/d/libguestfs/tools/virt-tar line 272."

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/908321

virt-cat fails on directory names "/dev/stdout: error in chunked encoding"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/907554

btrfs causes subsequent ntfs-3g filesystem to fail

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/905341

"No such file or directory" when execute "hivex-commit"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/903620

btrfs_subvolume_list broken due to change in subvolume list output

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/895910

guestmount: rename() incorrectly follows symbolic links

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/895905

guestmount: link() incorrectly returns ENOENT, when it should be EXDEV

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/895904

checksums-out fail to compute the checksums of all regular files in directory

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/894545

libguestfs FTBFS on Fedora 19 because of new ruby

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/890027

virt-sysprep: Setting hostname, domain name and pretty name on Fedora 18 correctly

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/887971

pvcreate fails if partition contains a swap signature

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/887520

zero_free_space: open: /sysroot//ujqqq135.rd3: Cannot allocate memory

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/886915

libguestfs with libvirt attach-method fails with odd error if default hypervisor is Xen

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/847549

Adding a zero-length virtio-scsi disk causes: qemu-kvm: hw/scsi-bus.c:1568: scsi_req_complete: Assertion `req->status == -1' failed.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/811649

libguestfs cannot open disk images which are symlinks to files that contain ':' (colon) character

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/664558

RFE: Allow to set log callback in Ruby bindings

New features¶

libvirt and sVirt (SELinux confinement)

You can optionally use libvirt to launch and manage the backend appliance by:

• setting "LIBGUESTFS_ATTACH_METHOD=libvirt[:URI]"
• using "./configure --with-default-attach-method=libvirt[:URI]"
• or calling the API method "guestfs_set_attach_method"

SVirt (SELinux confinement) is used to secure the libguestfs appliance, if the libvirt backend is selected.

virtio-scsi, larger number of drives, hotplugging

Virtio-scsi is now used by default, if it is available. This greatly increases the number of drives that can be added to a single libguestfs handle (up to 255).

You can now hotplug drives (add and remove drives after launch).

Libguestfs can now handle > 25 disks, in all APIs, tools and tests.

You can label drives when adding them, then refer to them by label (/dev/disk/guestfs/LABEL) instead of having to use device names (/dev/sda).

new library features

POSIX Access Control Lists (ACLs) and Linux filesystem capabilities can now be read and written through the API.

Windows Dynamic Disks are now supported. The metadata can only be read (volumes cannot be modified or created). However the data/filesystems in the volumes themselves can be mounted, read and written (Matthew Booth).

Hivex (Windows Registry editing) is now directly supported through the API, making reading or editing the Windows Registry much more efficient.

Several libguestfs APIs were reimplemented so they no longer have any limits on output. The reimplemented APIs are: "guestfs_cat", "guestfs_find", "guestfs_read_file", "guestfs_read_lines", "guestfs_write", "guestfs_write_append", "guestfs_lstatlist", "guestfs_lxattrlist", "guestfs_readlinklist", "guestfs_ls".

virt tools

"guestfish touch 'win:c:\new_file'" now works as expected.

"guestfish" has a new --network option, which enables the user network in libguestfs.

You can set "GUESTFISH_PS1" to use fancy prompts in "guestfish".

"rsync", "ssh", "less" and "lrzip" commands are now available in virt-rescue. In addition, "rsync" can be used through the API for doing incremental copies.

"virt-sparsify" uses qcow2 v3 for increased efficiency.

"virt-sysprep" enhancements:

• generate new UUIDs for PVs and VGs
• remove the local machine ID (Wanlong Gao)
• remove ABRT data (Wanlong Gao)
• remove puppet keys and log files (Wanlong Gao)
• remove process accounting files (Wanlong Gao)
• new --firstboot parameter allowing firstboot scripts for customizing guests
• remove HOSTNAME field from "ifcfg-eth*" files (Wanlong Gao)
• miscellaneous improvements for SuSE (Olaf Hering)
• remove man pages cache (Wanlong Gao)
• remove crash data generated by kexec-tools (Wanlong Gao)

"virt-make-fs" can now create virtual floppy disks (VFDs).

"guestmount" has a --pid-file option, which can be used to avoid a race condition between unmounting the filesystem and using the underlying disk image.

language bindings

Full-featured Lua bindings have been added in this release (thanks to Jerome Vuarand for many suggestions).

In Ruby, optional arguments hash is optional.

In Python, optional arguments now don't use special "sentinel" values, so any integer can be passed as an optional argument.

Erlang bindings now come with examples and tests.

Erlang bindings now handle 64 bit integer parameters correctly.

The automated 'bindtests' now test for 64 bit cleanliness in parameter passing. Several bugs in the bindings were found and fixed as a result.

Better handling of blocking and non-blocking functions should make libguestfs calls more efficient.

inspection

Windows guests with unlimited-sized Registries are now supported. By adding the hivex API to the libguestfs API, it is much more efficient and easier to inspect and modify the Windows Registry in guests.

Better support for SuSE guests (Olaf Hering).

Return the architecture of installed applications (John Eckersberg).

Windows 8 is now supported.

Fedora 18 is now supported.

Inspection of ISOs/CDs/DVDs can now use the libosinfo database.

ports

Libguestfs without the appliance can be compiled on Mac OS X (Masami HIRATA).

RHEL 5 is now explicitly supported through the 'oldlinux' branch in upstream git.

PowerPC 64 bit is now supported. Also libguestfs has been examined for endianness bugs and these have been fixed.

daemon

A man page for the daemon (guestfsd(8)) is included.

Security¶

guestfish history file

The $HOME/.guestfish history file is now created with 0600 permissions (instead of 0644 before) so it is no longer world readable.

CVE-2012-2690

Old versions of both "virt-edit" and the "guestfish" "edit" command created a new file containing the changes but did not set the permissions, etc of the new file to match the old one. The result of this was that if you edited a security sensitive file such as /etc/shadow then it would be left world-readable after the edit.

This issue was assigned CVE-2012-2690, and is fixed in libguestfs ≥ 1.16.

For further information, see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=788642

New APIs¶

 acl-delete-def-file
 acl-get-file
 acl-set-file
 canonical-device-name
 cap-get-file
 cap-set-file
 create-flags
 device-index
 disk-has-backing-file
 disk-format
 disk-virtual-size
 filesystem-available
 fill-dir
 fstrim
 get-cachedir
 get-libvirt-requested-credentials
 get-libvirt-requested-credential-prompt
 get-libvirt-requested-credential-challenge
 get-libvirt-requested-credential-defresult
 get-tmpdir
 hivex-close
 hivex-commit
 hivex-node-add-child
 hivex-node-children
 hivex-node-delete-child
 hivex-node-get-child
 hivex-node-get-value
 hivex-node-name
 hivex-node-parent
 hivex-node-set-value
 hivex-node-values
 hivex-open
 hivex-root
 hivex-value-key
 hivex-value-type
 hivex-value-utf8
 hivex-value-value
 inspect-list-applications2 (John Eckersberg)
 list-ldm-volumes
 list-ldm-partitions
 ldmtool-create-all
 ldmtool-diskgroup-disks
 ldmtool-diskgroup-name
 ldmtool-diskgroup-volumes
 ldmtool-remove-all
 ldmtool-scan
 ldmtool-scan-devices
 ldmtool-volume-hint
 ldmtool-volume-partitions
 ldmtool-volume-type
 ls0
 max-disks
 mke2fs (Wanlong Gao)
 mklost-and-found
 mkswap [added label and uuid optional arguments]
 mktemp (Wanlong Gao)
 nr-devices
 parse-environment
 parse-environment-list
 rm-f
 rsync
 rsync-in
 rsync-out
 set-cachedir
 set-libvirt-supported-credentials
 set-libvirt-requested-credential
 set-tmpdir
 shutdown [backported to 1.16 and 1.18]
 tar-in [added compress flag]
 tar-out [added compress, numericowner, excludes flags]
 umount [added force and lazy optional arguments]
 utsname
 xfs-admin (Wanlong Gao)
 xfs-growfs (Wanlong Gao)
 xfs-info (Wanlong Gao)
 xfs-repair (Wanlong Gao)

In the C API only:

 guestfs_push_error_handler
 guestfs_pop_error_handler

Internals¶

qemu ≥ 1.1 is required (≥ 1.2 preferred).

febootstrap ≥ 3.20 is required.

libvirt is optional, but if you want to use the new libvirt backend for launching the appliance then libvirt ≥ 0.10.2 would be required.

Coverity has been run over the complete codebase, and many issues fixed (thanks Ondrej Vasik, Kamil Dudka).

Functions which previously had no optargs can now be converted to ones with optargs, making extending the API much more flexible. Source and binary backwards compatibility is preserved for users of the API.

The way that libguestfs APIs and structures are represented in the generator has changed to use an OCaml struct instead of a tuple. This makes generator descriptions more flexible and easier to understand. For details see commits 39d1a7db and eb185eef.

Separation of the library code into more files:

• Launch backends are now located in separate files eg. src/launch-appliance.c, "src/launch-libvirt.c".
• Generated action code is now split over several src/action*.c files, for faster compilation.
• The huge src/guestfs.c file is now split into smaller logical units.

POD (documentation) is now generated using a rewritten Perl program instead of pod2* + shell scripts.

Man pages now contain stable dates (Hilko Bengen).

Skipped tests now exit with code 77, so they appear as "SKIP:" in "make check" output.

The parallel mount-local test has been rewritten in C (RHBZ#838081).

Ruby 1.8.5 is now supported (though Ruby ≥ 1.9 is preferred).

Perl bindings can be disabled via "./configure --disable-perl" (Wulf C. Krueger). Note that Perl is still required in order to build libguestfs.

Java bindings are now enabled/disabled using "./configure --with-java" or "./configure --without-java" (Wulf C. Krueger).

New configure options "./configure --enable-code-profiling" and "./configure --enable-code-coverage".

Multiple fixes to use of 64 bit integers in language bindings.

The appliance backend now uses sgabios instead of vgabios (Dan Berrange).

The "./run" script now sets enough environment variables that you can run OCaml, Python, Ruby, Java, GJS, Erlang, Lua programs.

"./run --test" flag for running tests with minimal output. It also prints the time taken to run each test.

The "./run" script now builds up paths cumulatively, meaning that you can use "./run" twice, or use the libguestfs and libvirt "./run" scripts together.

You can extract a list of external commands required by the daemon, making building the appliance on certain distros easier (Olaf Hering).

The "virt-rescue" command is now tested during "make check".

The generator now removes unused generated files. This helps when going back and forth with git rebase, git bisect, etc.

Tests now run in a separate toplevel "tmp/" directory in the source. This allows the directory to be labelled for SELinux (sVirt), and also makes it easier to clean up.

"make syntax-check" now works to a greater extent, and many problems in the main code that were found by syntax-check have been fixed (thanks Jim Meyering).

Emacs mode (-*- foo -*-) has been added to generated files.

Progress bar output is now sent to /dev/tty so it doesn't end up in the regular output of the program. virt-resize and virt-sparsify now suppress progress bars if stdout is not a tty.

There is now a "./configure --without-libvirt" option. This is useful for testing that the code still compiles without libvirt.

There is now an internal mini-library for running commands. This allows us to redirect errors from external commands into events.

Code for handling temporary directories and the appliance cache was completely overhauled.

Code for temporarily ignoring/disabling errors now looks like this:

 guestfs_push_error_handler (g, NULL, NULL);
 guestfs_mkdir (g, "/foo"); /* We don't care if this fails. */
 guestfs_pop_error_handler (g);

The "tests/extra" directory has gone. The "extra tests" are now split into separately runnable targets, such as "make check-valgrind". Use "make help" to get a summary of the targets.

The "lpj" option is passed to the appliance kernel when using TCG. This should improve clock stability (thanks Marcelo Tosatti, Olaf Hering).

Bugs fixed¶

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/882417

libguestfs tools fail with odd error messages if TMPDIR is not an absolute path

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/882299

Windows 8 guest disks can't be mounted: "The NTFS partition is in an unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation or fast restarting), or mount the volume read-only with the 'ro' mount option."

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/881953

libguestfs: migration to /etc/hostname, /etc/vconsole.conf, /etc/locale.conf

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/880801

virt-df with two -a options displays incorrect disk image name

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/879416

libguestfs-test-tool pauses when you use --help option

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/876579

mke2fs API does not apply block device naming translation to journaldevice optarg

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/860235

SELinux policy ought to allow qemu to write to unconfined_u:object_r:user_tmp_t:s0

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/859949

RFE: inspect-list-applications does not return the architecture of RPM packages

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/859885

inspect-list-applications does not list all installed RPM packages with same name and different versions

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/859876

guestfish printed paths are not canonicalized

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/859875

Progress bar output should go to tty(?) stderr(?)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/858696

virt-sysprep reports Guestfs.Error("read_lines: fopen: /etc/sysconfig/network: No such file or directory") on some Fedora guests

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/858128

libguestfs fail to list devices added by add-drive-ro-with-if twice

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/858126

virt-inspector fail to work with some windows guests

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/853762

virt-sparsify should use a more robust method to detect the input format

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/853393

libvirt doesn't label console, serial sockets

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/853159

virt-rescue in Fedora 18 is completely broken

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/852394

libguestfs inspection limits registries to 100 MiB

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/852194

virt-sparsify --compress fails if output is raw format

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/847881

RFE: allow extra arguments (like --exclude) to tar-out

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/847880

tar-out should allow (or force) --numeric-owner

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/845522

guestfish "copy-out / localdir" command fails with "No such file or directory"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/845488

Long filenames on NTFS cause tar-out, copy-out etc to fail with error "Cannot open: File name too long"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/842307

RFE: Need help designing and implementing selinux policy for libguestfs/sVirt

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/840572

virt-make-fs / tar-in should support vfat properly

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/840115

guestfish touch problem - case_sensitive_path API expects the file to exist

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/836710

Data loss when writing to qcow2-format disk files

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/834712

lvresize, lvresize-free fail unnecessarily if you don't change the size of the LV: "New size (nn extents) matches existing size (nn extents)"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/824716

compress-device-out didn't support bzip2

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/824043

guestfish unrecognized mount option gives confusing error message

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/823887

Filenames containing Chinese characters can't be created on vfat filesystems

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/823885

virt-make-fs cannot create vfat filesystem containing filesystems with Chinese characters

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/823883

virt-make-fs -t fat fails with an obscure error message

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/823821

Inspection fails when /etc/HOSTNAME is empty

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/801117

libguestfs cannot get icon for Windows 8

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/798979

Ubuntu install CDs from oneiric onwards are not recognized: "multi-boot operating systems are not supported"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/782167

libguestfs doesn't recognize Windows Dynamic disks in some configurations, eg. spanned

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/713678

Not all febootstrap messages are redirected to log callbacks

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/627675

libguestfs inspector code cannot handle /dev/disk/by-id/* paths

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/602997

part-get-bootable gives wrong result with an unordered part layout

New features¶

virt tools

   - virt-sysprep has been rewritten and expanded (thanks Wanlong Gao)
     http://libguestfs.org/virt-sysprep.1.html
   - virt-sparsify --zero is a new option that zeroes the named
     partition or filesystem
   - virt-sparsify can now safely sparsify Linux swap partitions
   - virt-sparsify fixed so it cleans up after ^C
     http://libguestfs.org/virt-sparsify.1.html
   - a new tool 'libguestfs-make-fixed-appliance' is provided to build
     fixed appliances that can be copied to other machines that don't
     have febootstrap support
     http://libguestfs.org/libguestfs-make-fixed-appliance.1.html
   - virt-filesystems now displays the parents (containers) of MD
     devices and volume groups
   - virt-alignment-scan, run with no args, displays alignment information
     for all libvirt domains
   - virt-df and virt-alignment-scan will display information from all
     guests even when a disk is inaccessible
   - virt-rescue new --scratch option to make scratch disks
     https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/virt-rescue-scratch/#content
   - virt-make-fs can now be used to create btrfs
   - virt-edit preserves permissions, UID, GID and SELinux context
     when editing files
   - guestfish passes the close event over stdout and remote correctly
   - guestfish new '--pipe-error' option lets you detect errors in pipe
     commands
   - guestfish globs now expand device names
   - comma and colon characters in filenames now handled correctly by
     all virt tools

inspection

   - added support for Fedora 17+
   - added support for FreeDOS
   - added support for Buildroot and Cirros
   - inspection is now compatible with Windows guests that have been
     sysprepped (thanks Grant Williamson).

API

   - broad support for btrfs added, including adding multiple devices,
     fsck, snapshots (thanks Wanlong Gao)
   - the new 'mount-local' API brings FUSE support directly into the
     core libguestfs API
     https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2012/05/14/tip-using-mount-local-api-from-c/#content
   - new man page: guestfs-performance(1), which contains performance
     tuning tips
     http://libguestfs.org/guestfs-performance.1.html
   - new man page: guestfs-faq(1), Frequently Asked Questions
     http://libguestfs.org/guestfs-faq.1.html
   - ENOTSUP (from guestfs_last_errno) is now returned for APIs that
     are not supported

examples

   - 'copy_over' example showing how to copy between two handles
   - 'display_icon' program displays the icon associated with a guest
   - 'mount_local.c' example shows how to use the mount-local API

Security¶

  (no security problems were found or fixed in this release)

New APIs¶

  btrfs-device-add: Add devices to a btrfs filesystem.
  btrfs-device-delete: Remove devices from a btrfs filesystem.
  btrfs-filesystem-sync: Sync a btrfs filesystem.
  btrfs-filesystem-balance: Balance a btrfs filesystem.
  btrfs-fsck: Check btrfs filesystem.
  btrfs-set-seeding: Enable or disable seeding.
  btrfs-subvolume-create: Create a btrfs snapshot.
  btrfs-subvolume-delete: Delete a btrfs snapshot.
  btrfs-subvolume-list: List btrfs snapshots and subvolumes.
  btrfs-subvolume-set-default: Set default btrfs subvolume.
  btrfs-subvolume-snapshot: Create a writable btrfs snapshot.
  get-e2attrs: List ext2 file attributes of a file.
  get-e2generation: Get ext2 file generation of a file.
  isoinfo, isoinfo-device: Get information from the header of ISO files.
  llz: List files with SELinux information.
  lvcreate-free: Create an LVM logical volume in % remaining free space.
  md-stat: Return underlying devices from an MD device.
  mkfs-brtfs: Make btrfs filesystem, with all tunables.
  mount-local, mount-local-run, umount-local: FUSE support in the API.
  ntfsclone-in, ntfsclone-out: Save, restore NTFS from backup.
  ntfsfix: Fix common errors and force Windows to check NTFS.
  set-e2attrs: Set or clear ext2 file attributes of a file.
  set-e2generation: Set ext2 file generation of a file.
  set-label: Unified interface for setting filesystem label.
  vgmeta: Get volume group metadata.
  wipefs: Wipe filesystem signatures from a device.
  zero-free-space: Zero free space in a filesystem.

Internals¶

 - The debian/ subdirectory has been removed.  We recommend you use
   the official Debian packages made by Hilko Bengen.
   http://people.debian.org/~bengen/libguestfs/
   http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=libguestfs
 - O_CLOEXEC / SOCK_CLOEXEC is now used for almost all file
   descriptors that the library opens.
 - posix_fadvise is called when sequentially reading or writing large
   files.
 - close all file descriptors and remove all signal handlers in the
   recovery process
 - multiple gcc warnings and Coverity bugs have been fixed;  many
   strict-overflow bugs have also been fixed
 - use ./configure --enable-valgrind-daemon to use valgrind on the
   daemon;  many errors have been fixed
 - use ./configure --with-qemu-options to pass extra options to qemu
 - the daemon now has a growable strings buffer type (DECLARE_STRINGSBUF)
 - the <guestfs.h> header file works with C++ and we have a regression
   test for this
 - multiple APIs which should only be called in the CONFIG state now
   give an error if they are not
 - .gitignore fixed to use absolute paths
 - gobject bindings have been expanded, including mapping libguestfs
   events to gobject signals (thanks Matt Booth)
 - gobject documentation is generated properly (thanks Matt Booth)
 - gobject header files now live in a subdirectory
 - CompareWithString test in the generator now works
 - FUInt32, FUInt64 struct field types now use the correct XDR type
 - OCaml tests are now run on bytecode and native code.
 - java -Xlint:all is used, and all warnings have been fixed
 - bmptopng, wrestool (etc) missing or failure no longer prints
   warning messages
 - ruby: Use RbConfig instead of Config.
 - PYTHONPATH is set by the ./run script.
 - appliance building is now thread-safe.
 - appliance now uses 'ip' instead of 'ifconfig' and 'netstat'
   commands
 - several fixes to make parallel builds work properly
 - guestfish --listen now cleans up properly
 - the BUSY state has been removed
 - gettextize has been removed, replaced by a simple Makefile.am
 - gettext support now covers virt-resize, virt-sparsify and virt-sysprep
 - better support for the arm architecture

Bugs fixed¶

 - 822490 virt-ls error: "libguestfs: error: checksum: path: parameter cannot be NULL"
 - 816839 data overflow error when debug progress -1
 - 816098 virt-make-fs fails to make a btrfs filesystem because it doesn't allocate enough space
 - 811872 inspection fails on ubuntu 10.04 guest with encrypted swap
 - 811650 guestfs_last_error not set when qemu fails early during launch
 - 811649 libguestfs cannot open disk images which are symlinks to files that contain ':' (colon) character
 - 811117 [RFE][virt-sysprep] net-hwaddr not removed from "ifcfg-*" files on rhel
 - 811112 [RFE][virt-sysprep] hostname can not be changed on rhel system
 - 809361 inspection doesn't recognize Fedora 18 (grub2 + GPT)
 - 807905 mkfs blocksize option breaks when creating btrfs
 - 805070 virt-filesystems should show 'parents' of LV and RAID devices
 - 804464 libguestfs cannot be built when LINGUAS is different then ja or uk
 - 803664 libguestfs inspection fails on Windows XP: libguestfs: error: hivex: could not locate HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
 - 803533 guestfish: write error
 - 802389 event handlers for 'close' event doesn't work in remote mode
 - 802109 libguestfs uses putc on stderr, results in many individual 1 byte writes of debug messages
 - 801640 [RFE] the error reported by resize2fs-M need to be more clear
 - 801298 Possible null dereference and resource leaks
 - 801273 Document for set-pgroup need to be updated
 - 798196 virt-resize confuses format and output_format variables; using --output-format sets the input format
 - 797986 virt-resize on Windows XP in sysprep state causes "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME" BSOD
 - 796520 [RFE] Prevent user from running some appliance configure commands after appliance boot up
 - 790721 multiprovider build error: RuntimeError: link: /tmp/.guestfs-0/kernel /tmp/.guestfs-0/kernel.10139: File exists
 - 789960 guestfsd crash when try to mount non-exist disk
 - 789504 virt-df (other tools?) should not give up if a guest disk is missing
 - 788641 virt-edit doesn't preserve file permissions
 - 786215 libguestfs inspection does not recognize FreeDOS operating system
 - 786188 libguestfs inspection does not recognize FreeDOS install CD
 - 785668 aug-defnode: daemon crash
 - 784647 Libguestfs uses deprecated net-tools
 - 769304 virt-resize on RHEL 6 kernel fails to re-read the partition table
 - 755729 Error message for resize2fs-M needs tweaking
 - 701814 virt-win-reg fails on a libvirt guest that has no defined disk format: "format parameter is empty or contains disallowed characters"
 - 679737 libguestfs: improve error message when zerofree is not available in the appliance
 - 635971 glob mkfs ext2 /dev/vd[b-t]1 does not expand

New features¶

libguestfs

   - allow XFS filesystems to be created over an existing filesystem
     (Wanlong Gao)
   - the (unspecified) default alignment for part-disk has been
     changed to 64K for better support of high-end network-attached
     storage
   - new guestfs-testing(1) man page
   - list-filesystems returns MD devices containing filesystems
     (Matthew Booth)
   - support for GCC >= 4.7 (Jim Meyering)
   - check user does not add the same drive twice (Wanlong Gao).

language bindings

   - Experimental GObject bindings, with support for GObject
     Introspection.  You can now use libguestfs from Javascript.
     Please note these are not stable and final in this release.
     (Matthew Booth).
   - support for Ruby >= 1.9
   - Ruby bindings can be disabled individually (Hilko Bengen)
   - support for Python 2.6, 3.x (Richard Jones, Hilko Bengen)
   - support for PHP >= 5.4
   - new %guestfs_introspection hash is available in Perl bindings so
     you can query which optional arguments are available

inspection

   - guests with MD devices can be inspected (Matthew Booth)
   - support for GNU/Hurd guests

guestfish

   - libguestfs events (such as progress bar events and log messages) can
     be trapped and processed by user-defined shell scripts.
   - MD devices are tab-completed (Matthew Booth)

virt tools

   - New tool virt-format for erasing and making blank disks
   - virt-sparsify new --compress and -o options to allow for compressed
     and different format output
   - virt-sparsify can now detect and sparsify .vdi files
   - virt-sysprep no longer requires xmlstarlet; a new virt-inspector --xpath
     option has been added to replace this functionality
   - virt-rescue has a new --suggest option which suggests mount commands
     for the guest
   - virt-resize no longer requires OCaml pcre library

libguestfs live

   - daemon will no longer try to edit your live /etc/lvm configuration
   - fix a potential security problem with predictable /tmp names (Steve Kemp)

Security¶

  CVE-2011-4127, RHBZ#757071
  Mitigate possible privilege escalation via SG_IO ioctl
  For more information, see: https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/commit/9a5f784d511a8f00a8386f316eab41fe660430db

New APIs¶

  blkid: print all attributes of a device known to blkid (Wanlong Gao)
  e2fsck: access to more features of e2fsck (Wanlong Gao)
  list-md-devices: list of Linux MD devices (Matthew Booth)
  md-create: create an MD device
  md-detail: returns metadata for an MD device (Matthew Booth)
  md-stop: stop an MD device (Wanlong Gao)
  tune2fs: allow ext2/3/4 filesystems to be tuned

Internals¶

  Git hosting has moved to http://github.com/libguestfs
  The various test directories have been rearranged logically, and now
  all appear under 'tests/'.
  There is a 'make extra-tests' rule which runs ordinary tests and
  additional tests, using valgrind to check for memory problems.
  Multiple memory leaks and other problems found by valgrind and fixed.
  Support for optional arguments in the generator has been rewritten
  to provide more features and safety (Matthew Booth).
  With gcc -fvisibility=hidden is used for internal symbols, avoiding
  call indirection via the PLT.
  RHashtable functions can be tested in the generator.
  ADD_ARG macro in daemon allows arg lists to be constructed without
  risk of stack smashing.
  Fix generation of OCaml functions that have more than 10 arguments.
  psmisc has been added to the appliance, allowing use of 'fuser',
  'killall' and 'pstree' for debugging.
  bindtests now cover RBufferOut and optional arguments (Matthew Booth).

Bugs fixed¶

 - 769680 temporary directories created during appliance builds are not cleaned up on error
 - 761460 guestfs_utimens hangs on named pipes
 - 761451 guestfs_utimens cannot set times on a directory
 - 760775 "guestfish: multi-boot operating systems are not supported by the -i option" should be more explanatory
 - 760669 guestfish copy-in and <! (inline execution) don't mix well: pclose: No child processes
 - 760000 libguestfs fails to compile with Ruby >= 1.9
 - 755729 Error message for resize2fs-M needs tweaking
 - 750889 Python code incompatible with Python v3.
 - 596761 Ctrl-\ causes guestfish to abort

New features¶

  Erlang bindings.
  virt-alignment-scan is a new tool to check the alignment of
  partitions within virtual machines or disk images.
  virt-sparsify is a new tool to make virtual machine disk images
  sparse.
  virt-sysprep is a new tool to make cloning guests from a template
  simpler.

guestfish

   - New commands setenv, unsetenv, to set environment variables.
   - The input file and line number is printed in error messages.
   - guestfish progress bars are now a "mini-library" used by other
     tools too.

guestmount

   - the --live option (for access to live VMs) now works.

virt-cat

   - virt-cat can now handle Windows paths and drive letters (RHBZ#693359).

virt-filesystems

   - the MBR partition type byte is displayed in --long output.

virt-make-fs

   - virt-make-fs now sets the MBR partition type byte correctly,
     improving compatibility with Windows (RHBZ#746295).

virt-resize

   - virt-resize can now work with guests using extended and logical
     partitions, in particular Ubuntu guests.
   - virt-resize can now align the first partition of Windows guests,
     improving performance.  The new virt-resize --align-first option
     controls this behaviour.
   - The virt-resize --machine-readable flag makes it possible to use
     virt-resize from other programs.
   - Partitions are now aligned to 128 sectors (usually 64K) by
     default.  This improves efficiency on high-end storage.  The new
     virt-resize --alignment option allows the alignment to be
     adjusted.

virt-win-reg

   - The syntax for deleting registry keys and values is documented
     in the man page (RHBZ#737944).

library

   - non-printing characters are escaped correctly in debug output.
   - GUESTFS_EVENT_ENTER is a new event type generated whenever a
     libguestfs function is called.
   - the library contains systemtap/DTrace probes.
   - the library can now be compiled without hivex (RHBZ#723474).

inspection

   - Improve detection of Windows disks.
   - Adds support for:
         ttylinux - a minimal Linux
         Mageia (thanks Michael Scherer)
         OpenSUSE and zypper (thanks Michael Scherer, Vincent Untz)
         Ubuntu logos (thanks Michael Scherer)
         NetBSD and pkgsrc (thanks Michael Scherer)
   - Handle some guest types that use /dev/root in /etc/fstab.
   - Fix handling of guests with > 26 disks (thanks Matthew Booth)
   - Add support for guests with HP Smart Array disks (thanks Matthew Booth)

febootstrap

   - FEBOOTSTRAP_KERNEL, FEBOOTSTRAP_MODULES environment variables can
     be set in order to choose which kernel to use for the appliance.

misc

   - ArchLinux support now working with Linux 3.0 (thanks Erik Nolte)
   - libvirt disks marked <readonly/> are now added readonly when
     using the virt-tools '-d' option.

Security¶

  (no security problems were found or fixed in this release)

New APIs¶

  compress-out, compress-device-out, copy-device-to-device,
  copy-device-to-file, copy-file-to-device, copy-file-to-file,
  get-smp, part-to-partnum, set-smp.
  The mount API no longer implicitly adds -o sync,noatime options.
  add-domain has a new 'readonlydisk' optional parameter to control
  how <readonly/> disks are handled.

Internals¶

 - Coverity was run on the source and more bugs were identified and
   fixed.
 - PCRE library is now required to build libguestfs.
 - APIC is now the default for the appliance.  You can also enable
   SMP support in the appliance.
 - OCaml bindings now correctly acquire GC lock during callbacks.
 - Out of tree builds should now work correctly (thanks Hilko Bengen).
 - ./configure --with-extra="..." can be used by packagers to set
   the extra version string.
 - zero, zero-device APIs: if the blocks already contain zeroes,
   don't write zeroes, so that we don't unnecessarily make the
   underlying storage non-sparse.
 - is-zero, is-zero-device APIs: optimize these so zero detection is
   faster.

Bugs fixed¶

 - 748266 libguestfs should detect versions of qemu which require -machine pc option
 - 747290 libguestfs ignores <readonly/> in libvirt XML
 - 747287 Misleading error message when permission denied opening a disk image
 - 746295 virt-make-fs doesn't set partition ID
 - 744795 guestmount --live is not usable
 - 737944 virt-win-reg hyphen (delete key) syntax may be wrong, and is not documented
 - 733297 ruby event handlers fail with "exception in callback: wrong argument type Proc (expected Data)"
 - 731744 libguestfs should escape special/non-printing characters in debug output
 - 729887 appliance crashes running aug_init with flags=4
 - 729075 libguestfs confuses Hp_recovery partition with Windows root filesystem
 - 727178 error: luks_open: cryptsetup: error while loading shared libraries: libfipscheck.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
 - 726739 libguestfs: error: aug_get: no matching node, trying to find hostname
 - 723474 If hivex and/or pcre not installed, libguestfs fails to compile
 - 693359 virt-cat and virt-edit don't handle case sensitive NTFS paths properly
 - 678231 virt-inspector reports unknown filesystem UUID
 - 671082 libguestfs does not work with kernel-rt
 - 666578 libguestfs: unknown filesystem label SWAP-sda2
 - 642821 virt-resize falls over on a disk image with a logical swap partition

New features¶

guestfish

   - guestfish strings can use escapes,
     eg. ><fs> write /foo "line 1\nline 2\n"
   - guestfish write-append command can be used to append to files.
   - Long-running file uploads and downloads can be cancelled through the
     API or by hitting ^C in guestfish.
   - New guestfish "display" command for displaying graphical files
     inside guests.
   - In guestfish, tab completion now works on /dev/mapper devices.

virt-inspector

   - Inspection API can get an icon or logo for certain guests.
   - virt-inspector includes the logo and hostname for certain guests.
   - virt-inspector can now get the version and release numbers for RPM
     packages.
   - CentOS and Scientific Linux are now treated as separate distros by
     the inspection API.

virt-resize

   - virt-resize can now handle btrfs.
   - New virt-resize --ntfsresize-force option allows Windows VMs to be
     resized multiple times.

other virt tools

   - guestfish, guestmount, virt-cat, virt-df, virt-edit, virt-filesystems,
     virt-inspector, virt-ls and virt-rescue now allow you to use
     "-d UUID" option to specify a guest by UUID.  This makes them more
     robust to use from other programs.
   - virt-ls -lR option allows complex file iteration and guest analysis.
   - virt-win-reg supports HKEY_USERS\<SID> and HKEY_USERS\<username>.
   - virt-win-reg new option --unsafe-printable-strings allows printable
     strings to be displayed in the output (unsafely: read the documentation
     before using).
   - virt-edit has been rewritten in C.

API and language bindings

   - Java is now completely supported.
     See http://libguestfs.org/guestfs-java.3.html
   - JRuby is supported via the Java bindings.
   - guestfs_close now appears in trace messages.
   - Python binding adds explicit g.close() method.
   - Python programs can now use the new event API.
   - Python GIL is released during libguestfs calls, allowing multithreaded
     Python programs to work properly.
   - 9pfs (Plan 9 filesystems exported from the host) are now supported.
   - Add -DGUESTFS_WARN_DEPRECATED=1 to warn about use of deprecated API
     functions in C programs.
   - New manual page guestfs-recipes(1) with recipes.
   - mkfs-opts can now set inode size and sector size on created filesystems
     (thanks Nikita Menkovich).
   - guestfs_last_errno is now accessible from OCaml (as g#last_errno ()).

Security¶

 - optargs_bitmask is checked even for calls that have no optional
   arguments.  This closes a possible exploit in the daemon from
   untrusted callers.

New APIs¶

  btrfs-filesystem-resize, get-pgroup, inspect-get-icon, is-zero,
  is-zero-device, list-9p, list-dm-devices, mount-9p, ntfsresize-opts,
  set-pgroup, write-append

Internals¶

 - Coverity (a static analysis tool) was run across the codebase and
   many fixes were made.
 - Generator can handle functions that return RBufferOut and have
   optional arguments.
 - Compatible with Perl 5.14.
 - Compatible with gcc 4.6.
 - Perform safety checks on QEMU.
 - C API tests can now fully test calls that have optional arguments.
 - Use ./configure --enable-install-daemon to install /usr/sbin/guestfsd.
 - po-docs directory now covers all man pages.
 - stderr from qemu process is now captured by the event subsystem.

Bugs fixed¶

 - 602997 part-get-bootable gives wrong result with an unordered part layout
 - 661280 virt-rescue: panic when shutting down: "/sbin/reboot: No such file or directory"
 - 700369 qemu-system-x86_64 says 'KVM not supported for this target'
 - 705200 guestmount attempt results in access denied
 - 714981 'list-filesystems' does not know about virtio 9p filesystems or detect existing mounts
 - 717786 libguestfs python bindings should have an explicit close call
 - 721275 virt-resize in F16 should support btrfs

New features¶

 - libguestfs and tools can be used against live virtual machines.
   See the 'guestfish --live' and 'guestmount --live' options, and (for
   the low-level interface) the new APIs set-attach-method and
   get-attach-method.
 - New virt tools:
   virt-copy-in, virt-copy-out, virt-tar-in, virt-tar-out.
 - libguestfs can get the drive letter mappings for Windows guests.
 - virt-inspector displays drive letter mappings for Windows guests.
 - Drive letters can now be used in virt-edit and guestfish programs
   when operating on Windows guests.
 - virt-resize now works on 32 bit hosts.
 - You can now inspect the install disks and live CDs of many different
   operating systems.
 - guestfish <! cmd which executes a shell cmd and inlines the result.
 - guestfish, guestmount, virt-rescue now all support --ro and --rw
   options, and the default for this can be chosen via a configuration
   file (/etc/libguestfs-tools.conf).
 - New event API allows more than one callback to be registered for
   each event, makes it possible to call the API from other languages,
   and allows nearly all log, debug and trace messages to be rerouted
   from stderr.
 - Greater FHS compliance for temporary files, including using /var/tmp
   for large cached files that should survive reboot (instead of /tmp).
 - guestfish, guestmount -m option allows mount options to be passed
   through to the underlying filesystem.
 - mkfs-opts allows filesystem features to be specified.
 - More intelligent handling of mountpoints, allowing mkmountpoint, mount
   and umount-all commands to work together properly.
 - Trace messages are prefixed with a distinct string, allowing them to
   be easily 'grepped' out from debug output.
 - guestfs_launch (guestfish 'run' command) now produces progress
   messages (a guestfish progress bar) if it takes longer than 5
   seconds to run.
 - Several long-running commands where we are unable to estimate time
   to completion generate "pulse mode" progress events.  Progress bar
   in guestfish has been updated to display these.
 - Publish new example code in: C, Perl, Python, OCaml, Ruby.
 - New virt-dhcp-address example program.
 - The Java and Ruby bindings have been improved greatly.
 - Perl includes a way to get the errno of the last error.
 - Python bindings now compatible with rpyc (thanks Erez Shinan).
 - Transifex is now being used to manage translations.
   http://www.transifex.net/projects/p/libguestfs/
 - Inspection now supports Red Hat Desktop, Slackware distributions.
 - Inspection no longer fails for Windows guests that have two or
   more disks.
 - Inspection can now tell the difference between Windows 2008 Server
   and Windows 7.
 - Inspection can detect 32 bit applications installed in 64 bit
   Windows, running on the WOW64 emulator.
 - A series of protocol fixes has fixed the old bug RHBZ#576879
   which used to cause errors during the upload command to lose
   protocol synchronization.
 - New logo!

Security¶

  [none]

New APIs¶

  first-private, get-attach-method, inspect-get-drive-mappings,
  inspect-get-product-variant,
  inspect-get-windows-current-control-set, next-private, resize2fs-M,
  set-attach-method.

Internals¶

 - The 'HACKING' file is obsolete.  The contents have been moved into
   a section of the guestfs(3) manual page.
 - libguestfs-test-tool simplified.  It no longer needs the static
   binary or tries to construct an ISO.
 - rpcgen-generated files are compiled with -fno-strict-aliasing
   which should be safer (thanks Matt Booth).
 - virt-resize was rewritten in OCaml.
 - guestfish and other tools tested with valgrind; some memory leaks
   were fixed.

Bugs fixed¶

 - 502533 Updated Polish translation of libguestfs
 - 576879 libguestfs protocol loses synchronization if you 'upload' before mounting disks
 - 599503 document that mkmountpoint and umount-all cannot be mixed
 - 617440 guestfish: fails to tilde expand '~' when the $HOME env is unset
 - 664558 RFE: Allow to set log callback in Ruby bindings
 - 665358 Punjabi Translation Completed (pa_IN)
 - 666577 libguestfs: unknown filesystem /dev/fd0
 - 667610 Multiple bugs, memory leaks in libguestfs ruby bindings
 - 668112 virt-filesystems command fails on guest with corrupt filesystem label
 - 668574 guestfish -i is trying to mount all mounts from /etc/fstab and fails with an error when device doesn't exists
 - 673479 Add a grep-friendly string to LIBGUESTFS_TRACE output
 - 674130 Inspection code fails for Windows guest with two disks
 - 682756 libguestfs trace segfaults when list-filesystems returns error
 - 682979 libguestfs incorrectly detects Red Hat desktop as 'redhat-based' instead of 'redhat'
 - 690819 mkfs fails creating a filesystem on a disk device when using a disk with 'ide' interface
 - 691389 Extended attributes don't work over guestmount (FUSE)
 - 691724 virt-inspector reports unknown filesystem /dev/vda1
 - 692545 inspect-list-applications fails to detect 32 bit apps installed under WOW64 emulator on 64 bit Windows
 - 693324 sfdisk's python interface only accepts lists of type 'list' for the lines parameter

New features¶

 - Support and packages for Debian and Ubuntu.
 - Daily builds from git repository on Debian and Ubuntu to reduce risk
   of regressions.
 - Port to ArchLinux 'pacman' (thanks Thomas S Hatch).
 - The following tools have been rewritten in C (originally in Perl):
     . virt-cat
     . virt-df
     . virt-inspector
     . virt-ls
     . virt-rescue
 - Some C tools support encrypted guests automatically.  This is
   supported in: guestfish, guestmount, virt-cat, virt-inspector,
   virt-ls.
 - New tool virt-filesystems (in C) which is a replacement for
   virt-list-filesystems and virt-list-partitions, and has a superset
   of the functionality of those tools.
 - guestfish, guestmount and the C tools use unified command line option
   parsing, so they support many common options such as '-a disk.img',
   '-d libvirt-domain', '-x', '-v'.  The old command line option
   parsing is preserved for compatibility in scripts etc.
 - guestfish no longer has any dependencies on Perl
 - New man pages containing programming examples: guestfs-examples(3) (C/C++),
   guestfs-ocaml(3), guestfs-python(3), guestfs-ruby(3).
 - Trace mode prints return values from API functions.
 - virt-inspector can list applications installed in Windows guests, along
   with a great deal of information about those applications.
 - Add support for inspecting: Linux Mint, Mandriva, FreeBSD.
 - guestfish --rw option (with no effect currently) to make potentially
   dangerous write access explicit.
 - guestfish --listen --csh for compatibility with csh, tcsh (thanks
   Eric Blake).
 - The first upstream version that introduced each API function is now
   documented in guestfs(3).
 - guestfs_last_errno allows you to retrieve the errno from the
   daemon, correctly translated to the local operating system.
 - Functions can now have optional parameters.
 - Progress bars and progress notifications can now happen for upload
   commands.
 - Appliance builder more careful about not leaving temporary files
   around in /tmp.
 - getfattr/setfattr commands added to virt-rescue.
 - ROADMAP file covers roadmap and goals for future releases.

Security¶

 - New SECURITY section in guestfs(3) API documentation.
 - virt-inspector no longer runs any guest commands.
 - Inspection code is more careful about avoiding very large files
   from guests which might previously have caused a denial of service.
 - FUSE calls into guestmount are now traced when using guestmount -x.

New APIs¶

 - add-domain
 - add-drive-opts
 - getxattr
 - inspect-get-hostname
 - inspect-get-package-format
 - inspect-get-package-management
 - inspect-get-roots
 - inspect-list-applications
 - lgetxattr
 - mkfs-opts

Internals¶

 - C programs now only link precisely with the libraries that they use.
 - PCRE, libmagic, hivex and libvirt libraries are now completely
   optional for building.
 - Multiple memory leaks and file descriptor leaks fixed.
 - Add a POD wrapper to unify generation of man pages and HTML files
   across all programs.
 - Source includes phony images of Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu and
   Windows guests.
 - Ruby bindings have 'make install' rule.
 - <guestfs.h> is now a single file.
 - <guestfs.h> does not require XDR headers.
 - ocaml xml-light library is no longer required to build (thanks
   Maxim Koltsov).
 - ./configure --disable-[...] for each language binding (thanks
   Maxim Koltsov).
 - Old ocaml-viewer program removed (use guestfs-browser instead).
 - New C API test type 'InitScratchFS' makes the tests run a little
   more quickly.
 - Excluded packages in the appliance are now listed in a separate
   file appliance/excludelist.in, and can be customized per-distro.

Bugs fixed¶

 - 663407 readlink and readlinklist returns /sysroot/ in some paths
 - 661280 virt-rescue: panic when shutting down: "/sbin/reboot: No such file or directory"
 - 657499 checksum: wrong check sum type causes umount to fail
 - 655554 Whole disk paths are not made canonical by virt-inspector
 - 654638 openssl updated to 1.0.0b libguestfs depends on exact file names
 - 652796 ruby bindings not installed by 'make install', hence omitted from the binary distribution

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

New features¶

 - guestfish lets you choose a prepared disk image, eg:
     guestfish -N fs:ext4
 - Add write support to guestmount (FUSE) module.
 - virt-resize can now resize the content of partitions and logical
   volumes in the guest, and we have better support for shrinking guests.
 - Bash tab-completion script for guestfish.
 - Add ZFS support to virt-rescue.
 - New tool 'virt-make-fs' for creating filesystems with content.
 - Allow suffixes on any guestfish number parameter, eg. "1M".
 - guestfish 'man' command opens the manual page.
 - guestfish supports a "heredoc" syntax for uploading files:
     upload -<<_end_ /foo
     content
     _end_
 - Some guestfish commands now print their output in octal or hex
   where appropriate (RHBZ#583242).
 - Allow dash prefix on guestfish command line.  This ignores any
   error from the second command:                   (RHBZ#578407)
     guestfish -- cmd1 : -cmd2 : cmd3
 - guestfish -h / help command now returns an error for non-existent
   commands (RHBZ#597145).
 - New 'supported' command in guestfish to list optional groups of
   commands which are supported by the daemon / configuration.
 - virt-inspector and guestfish -i now work for filenames which
   contain spaces (RHBZ#507810).
 - Change the protocol to use link-local addresses, to avoid
   conflicting with any address that the host might be using
   (RHBZ#588763).
 - libguestfs now sets the correct time and timezone on filesystem
   modifications.
 - Sort the domains into alphabetical order in virt-df.
 - Make mkfs-b command work for FAT and NTFS by mapping the blocksize
   parameter to the cluster size (RHBZ#599464).
 - Add version numbers to Perl modules (RHBZ#521674).
 - Localization now works for all the libguestfs tools (RHBZ#559963).
 - Tools now support filesystem-on-image VMs (RHBZ#590167).
 - virt-list-partitions has a '-t' option to show the total size of disks.
 - Include extra Augeas lenses in the supermin appliance (Matthew Booth).
 - Add error and close callbacks.
 - Add explicit close method in the Perl API.
 - Multiple fixes for RHEL 5 compatibility.
 - Multiple fixes for Debian/Ubuntu compatibility.
 - Multiple revisions to improve the documentation.

Security¶

 - Fix a potential DoS in virt-inspector and virt-v2v if a specially
   crafted disk image contained a char device in place of one of the
   configuration files that we read under /etc (RHBZ#582484).

New APIs¶

 - aug-clear - clear Augeas path
 - available-all-groups - return a list of all optional groups
 - base64-in - upload base64-encoded data to file
 - base64-out - download file and encode as base64
 - checksum-device - compute checksums on the contents of a device
 - checksums-out - compute checksums of multiple files in a directory
 - debug-upload - upload a file to the appliance
 - fallocate64 - preallocate a file in the guest filesystem
 - fill-pattern - fill a file with a repeating pattern of bytes
 - get-umask - get the current umask
 - lvresize-free - expand an LV to fill free space
 - ntfsresize - resize an NTFS filesystem
 - ntfsresize-size - resize an NTFS filesystem (with size)
 - part-del - delete a partition
 - part-get-bootable - get the bootable flag of a partition
 - part-get-mbr-id - get the MBR type byte of a partition
 - part-set-mbr-id - set the MBR type byte of a partition
 - pvresize-size - resize a physical volume (with size)
 - pwrite - write to part of a file
 - resize2fs-size - resize an ext2/3/4 filesystem (with size)
 - txz-in - unpack compressed tarball to directory (RHBZ#580556)
 - txz-out - pack directory into compressed tarball (RHBZ#580556)
 - vfs-label - get the filesystem label
 - vfs-uuid - get the filesystem UUID
 - vgscan - rescan for LVM physical volumes, volume groups and logical volumes
 - write - create a new file
 - zero-device - write zeroes to an entire device

Internals¶

 - Extend the generator to support testing optional features.
 - Stricter checks on input parameters to many calls (RHBZ#501893 RHBZ#501894)
 - Extend the protocol to support sending arbitrary 8 bit data buffers.
 - Ship 'BUGS' file with releases.  This is a summary of the bugs in
   the Red Hat Bugzilla database.
 - Ship 'RELEASE-NOTES' file with releases, containing release notes.
 - Unify supermin appliance building into one place, in febootstrap 2.7.
 - Fix the protocol code to handle the case where both ends send cancel
   messages at the same time.

Bugs fixed¶

 - 612178 guestfish: using -m option in conjunction with --listen option causes appliance to die
 - 610880 libguestfs should set broader read perms on tmpdir, so works in some situations when executed with umask 077
 - 604691 OCaml bindings are not thread safe
 - 603870 Updates to Spanish translation
 - 602592 [RFE] expose guestfs_close in perl bindings
 - 600977 virt-df -h --csv "Argument .. isn't numeric in printf"
 - 599464 mkfs-b does not support vfat/ntfs
 - 598807 add_cdrom does not work in RHEL 6
 - 598309 part-list and several other cmd failed on libguestfs on RHEL5
 - 597145 guestfish 'help' command should indicate error in exit status with an unknown command
 - 597135 guestfish write-file cmd does not check "size" parameter
 - 597118 A warning should be given in the help of mke2journal-L for the length of label
 - 597112 get-e2uuid should use blkid instead of "tune2fs -l" to get filesystem UUID
 - 596776 virt-inspector doesn't discover modprobe aliases on RHEL 3 guests
 - 596763 Updates to Spanish translation
 - 593292 Updates to Spanish translation
 - 592883 can not edit files on  images mounted with guestmount cmd
 - 592360 Updates to Spanish translation
 - 591250 virt-tar prints "tar_in: tar subcommand failed on directory" if the archive is compressed or not in the right format
 - 591155 virt-tar prints "tar_in: tar subcommand failed on directory" if a disk image is not writable
 - 591142 virt-inspector should give an error for unrecognized disk images
 - 590167 virt-inspector and other virt tools should be able to handle filesystem-on-image VMs
 - 589039 guestfish read-file cmd will cause daemon hang when read large files
 - 588851 guestfs_launch() returns -1, but guestfs_last_error() == NULL
 - 588763 libguestfs should use non-public or link-local addresses for appliance network
 - 588733 Updates to Spanish translation
 - 588651 guestfish 'strings-e' cmd does not give proper error message or hint
 - 587484 lvresize can't reduce size of a volumn
 - 585961 Updates to Spanish translation
 - 585223 ntfsresize should support shrinking filesystems
 - 585222 pvresize should support shrinking PVs
 - 585221 resize2fs should support shrinking filesystems
 - 584038 Updates to Spanish translation
 - 583554 [FEAT] mknod-mode command is needed to set mode explicitly
 - 583242 [RFE] guestfish should print outputs in a suitable base (eg. octal for modes)
 - 582993 guestfish eats words when tab completing case (in)sensitive paths
 - 582953 Misleading help information about lvcreate command
 - 582948 mknod command doesn't make block, character or FIFO devices
 - 582929 mknod doesn't check for invalid mode
 - 582901 guestfish chmod/umask commands do not check invalid mode value
 - 582899 guestfish:sparse is missed from command autocomplete list
 - 582891 [Feature Request] behavior and return value of guestfish umask cmd should be changed
 - 582548 [mknod] umask shouldn't take effect when mode is set explicitly
 - 582484 some guestfish sub commands can not handle special files properly
 - 582252 Updates to Spanish translation
 - 581501 Updates to Spanish translation
 - 580650 virt-inspector warns "No grub default specified at /usr/lib/perl5/Sys/Guestfs/Lib.pm at [...]"
 - 580556 request for libguestfs to support .txz tarballs
 - 580246 tar-in command hangs if uploading more than available space
 - 580016 aug-ls in guestfish does not take augeas variable as argument
 - 579664 guestfish doesn't report error when there is not enough space for image allocation
 - 579608 multiple commands in guestfish can not work for symbol links
 - 579155 libguestfs hangs if qemu doesn't start (in null vmchannel mode)
 - 578407 the prefix '-' in sub-command isn't handled by guestfish in remote control mode
 - 576879 libguestfs protocol loses synchronization if you 'upload' before mounting disks
 - 559963 libguestfs Perl programs do set locale, but still localization doesn't work
 - 521674 Perl modules are unversioned, but should carry version numbers
 - 516096 Race condition in test_swapon_label_0: /sbin/blockdev: BLKRRPART: Device or resource busy
 - 507810 guestfish -i / virt-inspector cannot handle spaces in filenames
 - 502533 Updated Polish translation of libguestfs
 - 501894 Some String parameters should be OptString
 - 501893 String parameters should be checked for != NULL
 - 501889 write-file does not support strings containing ASCII NUL
 - 484986 grub-install fails on virtio disk