On Fri, Jul 04, 2008 at 04:29:16PM +0100, John Levon wrote: > > What is the purpose of this option exactly? From a quick look it only > seems to be used to select which RPMs to use when doing an install. Is > there some extra semantics to it? The 'arch' is refering to the architecture of the guest OS kernel, eg one of i686, x86_64, ppc, sparc, etc, etc. The 'virsh capabilities' XML for a hypervisor driver declares what architectures the driver supports and thus allows virt-image to determine whether it is capable of executing the OS being requested. Some drivers like QEMU supported a whole suite of architectures by virtue of doing emulation, others only support matching host arch (eg Xen). Basically the idea behind the virt-image XML in general is to declare the requirements for its execution. This is matched up with capabilities of hosts. So things which are deployment specific are not included in the virt-image XML. As an example we declare the filessytem format (eg raw or qcow) but don't declare the full path or driver (eg tap vs phy vs file) since those are deployment details > Another question: it seems that virt-image always insists on an install > step. What was the intent behind using virt-convert (nee virt-unpack) > with virt-image output, in this case? I'm not sure what you mean by 'install step' here. The idea is that the disk image associated with the XML doc contains a pre-installed operating system (or 'appliance' in marketing buzzword bingo), so there isn't really any install step. We're merely validating requirements against capabilities, and configuring deployment specific details. The idea behind the virt-image/virt-unpack association is that the virt-image XML defines a portable format for 'appliance' metadata information (cf OVF) but not the distribution format (ZIP, tar.gz, etc). So the virt-pack tool would doing bundling into ZIP files. Regards, Daniel -- |: Red Hat, Engineering, London -o- http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://ovirt.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: GnuPG: 7D3B9505 -o- F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :| _______________________________________________ et-mgmt-tools mailing list et-mgmt-tools@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools
