Supermin appliance – now in febootstrap

Q: Can you fit a bootable Fedora distribution into 100 kilobytes?
A: You bet!*
* by cheating … read on.
Take an ordinary Fedora appliance as made by febootstrap or appliance-creator. The appliance image is big because it contains copies of programs (/bin/bash) and libraries (/lib/libc.so), the kernel and kernel modules. It needs to, to make [...]

febootstrap now available in Debian

Nearly available anyway. It’s still being uploaded.
So now you can make Fedora filesystems, images, initramfs, appliances, virtual machines etc. on a Debian host.

libguestfs packages for Debian

… and packages for febootstrap are here.
I only bound the C API and guestfish so far, not all the language bindings.

libguestfs on Debian

libguestfs now compiles and passes most of the tests on Debian.

debian5×64:~/d/libguestfs$ LIBGUESTFS_QEMU=~/d/qemu/qemu.wrapper ./fish/guestfish

Welcome to guestfish, the libguestfs filesystem interactive shell for
editing virtual machine filesystems.

Type: ‘help’ for help with commands
‘quit’ to quit the shell

><fs> alloc /tmp/test 100M
><fs> run
><fs> sfdisk /dev/sda 0 0 0 ,
><fs> mkfs ext3 /dev/sda1
><fs>
debian5×64:~/d/libguestfs$ file /tmp/test
/tmp/test: [...]

febootstrap now runs on Debian

With a minor patch I got febootstrap running on Debian. What can you do with it? Install and boot mini Fedora appliances from a Debian host.
If you want to try it, note you will need to install the following Debian packages before compiling from source:

autoconf automake make fakechroot >= 2.9 fakeroot yum >= [...]

New tool: virt-inspector

Today we released the first proper version of virt-inspector, which is a command line tool that tells you what’s in a virtual machine. You just point it at a disk image or a libvirt domain and it can tell you things like:

What operating system(s) are installed, and what distros and versions.
How [...]

libguestfs – fun with tar

I’ve added tar support to libguestfs. Two examples:
Extract a directory subtree
This pulls out /usr/share/doc from the guest and saves it as a local file called /tmp/doc.tar.gz:

$ guestfish -a guest.img -m /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00

Welcome to guestfish, the libguestfs filesystem interactive shell for
editing virtual machine filesystems.

Type: ‘help’ for help with commands
‘quit’ [...]

libguestfs 1.0.0 released, and Ruby bindings

libguestfs 1.0.0 is out, sources and binary RPMs here.
I also added Ruby bindings:

$ irb
irb(main):002:0> require ‘guestfs’
=> true
irb(main):003:0> g = Guestfs::create()
=> #<Guestfs::Guestfs:0×7feab981b630>
irb(main):004:0> g.add_drive(“RHEL52PV32.img”)
=> nil
irb(main):005:0> g.launch()
=> nil
irb(main):006:0> g.wait_ready()
=> nil
irb(main):007:0> g.lvs()
=> ["/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00", "/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01"]
irb(main):008:0> g.pvs()
=> ["/dev/sda2"]
irb(main):009:0> g.vgs()
=> ["VolGroup00"]
irb(main):010:0> g.list_partitions()
=> ["/dev/sda1", "/dev/sda2"]

libguestfs 0.8, now with fewer bugs :-)

I released libguestfs 0.8 yesterday, the library for accessing virtual machines. This version fixes a large number of bugs, because I wrote a test suite which sends several hundred commands through the library and verifies the results. Took a couple of days to fix all the bugs this found …
Here are some interesting [...]

libguestfs ocaml bindings

In addition to perl bindings, libguestfs now has OCaml bindings:

open Printf

let () =
if Array.length Sys.argv <= 1 ||
not (Sys.file_exists Sys.argv.(1)) then (
eprintf “Usage: lvs guest.img\n”;
exit 1
);

let h = Guestfs.create () in
Guestfs.add_drive h Sys.argv.(1);
Guestfs.launch [...]