Re: Virt-Manager: Supporting additional para-virtual OS's

[Robert Nelson <robertn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

David Lutterkort wrote:

On Thu, 2007-11-15 at 14:20 -0500, Hugh O. Brock wrote:
  

On Thu, Nov 15, 2007 at 07:14:29PM +0000, David Lutterkort wrote:
    

Another route (though one that takes more effort), is to base install on
virt-image metadata - the idea is that we would ship stock virt-image
files for installable OS's; those files would contain the salient bits
about an OS (such as APIC/ACPI, whether to enable a graphics console,
kernel cmdline for pv) virt-manager would have to modify those files a
little before passing them off to virt-image, mostly to put things like
the ISO location and path to the root disk in.

      

That seems like the right way to do it. We need an image-packager though, right?
    

Not necessarily .. I was thinking that virt-manager would edit the stock
image.xml to include user-provided information about where the install
ISO and the target disk file are. The image.xml we ship would be
complete except that it doesn't contain a <storage/> section, and that
the disk/target mapping is missing; those owuld be filled in by
virt-manager before kicking off the install. IOW, we'd use it mostly for
expressing arch, features, and whether to enable graphics.

  

This doesn't seem to solve the problem that started this thread if virt-manager is specifying the target device.

Even if you did allow the target device info to be expressed in the XML, how do you deal with numbering the variable number of devices?

For example xvda, xvdb, xvdc versus hda, hdb, hdc versus 0, 1, 2.  It seems like you need some sort of code to deal with this OS specific attribute.

There's a few problems still though: (1) virt-image doesn't let you
assign a MAC from XML and (2) IIRC it doesn't handle LVM volumes. Both
shouldn't be too hard to address. 

The main point is that the OS-specific install information should move
out of the code into some data files - and virt-image seems to be pretty
close in terms of what needs to be expressed.

  

Why not use libvirt's XML format?  It supports everything already.  It also should be easier to integrate with virt-manger.

David


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