New in virt-builder 1.25.2

Note these virt-builder features are not available in the 1.24 branch, they are new features in development.

In no particular order:

• --write can be used to write a literal file:

  virt-builder ... --write '/etc/motd:Obey me, users!'
  

• --upload can now upload a file into an existing directory, instead of having to specify the target filename.
• --mkdir can be used to create directories. It uses the equivalent of mkdir -p so it can create multi-level directories.
• --no-sync can be used to avoid the sync on exit. There’s a long explanation in the virt-builder(1) man page (which I won’t reproduce here) about why this might or might not be a good idea for you.
• pxzcat can be used, if available. I’m not sure yet whether we’ll package this, wait for parallel support in xz, or go for some custom C code in virt-builder.
• virt-resize is avoided when possible. This can speed up builds.
• Firstboot output is now also sent to the console, making it easy to monitor what’s going on with a virtual serial port.
• You can use the -m or --smp options to specify the amount of memory or number of VCPUs to give to the appliance when it runs the --run or --install commands. If (especially) yum ran of out memory in a big install, then -m 2048 is your friend.