Half-baked ideas: inject syscalls into virtual machines

For more half-baked ideas, see my “ideas” tag.
After we wrote virt-df and later libguestfs, what customers were asking me about was to be able to read out of /proc and /sys in a running virtual machine.
Of course that’s not possible with libguestfs. libguestfs reads the filesystem. /proc is a synthetic “filesystem” that only [...]

Use a snapshot to test libguestfs changes

If you want to test out some experimental libguestfs changes to a virtual machine, you can use a qemu snapshot to test changes before committing them. Here’s how.
First, use qemu-img to create a snapshot. In this case I have a base file called “RHEL52PV32-20090213.img” and my temporary snapshot will just be called “snapshot”. [...]

Why “minimal” is 225 MB

As I mentioned in the last post a “minimal” febootstrap Fedora install clocks in at a staggering 225 MB. When I say minimal, I mean just bash and the simplest command-line tools from coreutils:

$ ls /bin
arch chgrp cut echo fgrep ls [...]