Re: 'arch' in image XML

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



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

[Index of Archives]     [Fedora Users]     [Fedora Legacy List]     [Fedora Maintainers]     [Fedora Desktop]     [Fedora SELinux]     [Big List of Linux Books]     [Yosemite News]     [KDE Users]     [Fedora Tools]

  Powered by Linux