Red Hat Summit: hand-outs for our talk

Thanks to everyone who came to our Summit talk this year. We must have had over 200 people there.

There will be a video — it’s not up yet.

In the meantime, here are the hand-outs which contain background, documentation and worked examples. Both are PDFs:

• My hand-out (libguestfs, virt tools)

• Matthew Booth’s hand-out (virt-v2v, virt-p2v)

libguestfs RHEL 6.1 preview packages updated

The latest and hopefully final preview packages are available here:

http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/rhel6.1-libguestfs-preview/

RHEL 6.1 beta – libguestfs changes

RHEL 6.1 beta is available for customers on RHN.

The version of libguestfs in RHEL 6.1 is 1.7.17, but with 77 patches on top of the tarball it is essentially the same as the upstream stable branch 1.8.

New features are too numerous to mention, but the main thing is greatly improved performance. It’s 4x or 5x faster than the RHEL 6.0 version.

Red Hat Summit, Boston, 2011

Matt and my joint talk has been accepted for the Red Hat Summit in Boston, May 3-6th 2011.

I will be talking about new features in libguestfs in RHEL 6.1. I’ll be demonstrating as much as possible live from my laptop.

Updated libguestfs RHEL 6.1 preview packages

Updated packages are here now based on libguestfs 1.7.17.

Changes ahead for libguestfs RHEL 6.1 package

I previously said that libguestfs in RHEL 6.1 would be based on the recent upstream 1.6 release.

This plans have had to change slightly. It looks like we’ll rebase to 1.7.16 (a development version).

The reason is simply that to get into the next release of RHEV we had to remove the Perl dependencies on a number of key programs, because the tiny RHEV-H hypervisor [PDF] doesn’t have space to include Perl. Several programs like virt-inspector and virt-df had to be rewritten in C. We could backport all of the changes but they amount to nearly every change since 1.6 anyway.

What I do have to do is to meticulously check each C program precisely matches the old Perl version, in terms of output, command line arguments and so on, so that scripts written against RHEL 6.0 won’t break. But that’s what you pay Red Hat for.

Preview packages will be available here.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Looks like RHEL 6 is out.

Of course I’ve been using it for a while and it’s great.

This version has libguestfs-1.2.7-1.24.el6 (with backports) from back around April/May (when we started to stabilize and QA everything). Have fun using it, and when RHEL 6.1 ships it will come with libguestfs 1.6 which is much faster and more full-featured.

Want help? Don’t email me directly

Occasionally people email me directly about some software problem. Whether by coincidence or not, this happened quite a few times last week.

If you want help, email the public mailing lists. I won’t answer you if you email me directly.

Why is this? It’s not because I don’t want to help you. If I can, I will answer your question on the public list. It’s not a plot to get you to buy Red Hat support. Although if you do pay for support then you will get my individual attention.

There are two reasons:

1. On the mailing list, your question and the answer are on the public record. Others looking to solve the same problem can search and find the answer. If it’s not in the public record like that, then I’m going to have to answer everyone who emails me individually, and how is that going to scale?
2. By posting on the mailing list, someone else may be able to answer you, so it’s better for you too since there are more people who can answer your question.

libguestfs roadmap for 1.6, RHEL 6.1

We have mostly finalized the list of bugs and features that we will finish before the new stable branch of libguestfs (1.6) is created. You can view the list of 1.6 bugs and features here. Although I can’t promise exact dates, we’re hoping to have this out in November.

libguestfs is also due to be rebased for RHEL 6.1, and that will (probably) be based on upstream version 1.6. The new version is much faster (about 4x or 5x faster) than the version we are shipping in RHEL 6.0, and has a very large number of new features, but is backwards compatible with RHEL 6.0 so no code or script changes will be required.

Red Hat Summit, Boston, 2011

The Red Hat Summit 2011 will be again in Boston. The call for papers is now open.