On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 11:00:50PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 11:55:22PM +0200, Karel Zak wrote:
> > On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 05:46:28PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > > The current implementation of 'virsh create' takes an XML file as its only
> > > parameter & creates a domain from this. This is great if you have a suitable
> > > XML file already, but if you are just trying to automate some simple tasks
> > > from the shell then the need to use XML is a little cumbersome. Thus I was
> > > thinking perhaps we could have an alternate way to define a new VM (keep
> > > the current XML based way too of course)
> > >
> > > QEMU for example makes it very easy to launch a new VM:
> > >
> > > qemu -m 256 -hda /path/to/image.dsk -hdc /path/to/boot.iso
> > >
> > > Taking inspiration from this syntax we could allow:
> > >
> > > virsh start -m 256 -hda /path/to/image.dsk -hdc /path/to/boot.iso -name Foo
> > >
> > > Internally, the 'start' command would simply transform these command
> > > line args into the neccessary libvirt XML and then call the normal
> > > create functions.
> > >
> > > Another way would be have a 'genxml' command, which accepted these list
> > > of devices / config properties & then printed out appropriate XMl. This
> > > could be piped to the regular 'virsh create' command
> > >
> > > virsh genxml -m 256 -hda /path/to/image.dsk -hdc /path/to/boot.iso \
> > > -name Foo | virsh create -
> >
> > What use better command name instead "genxml"? For example "domgen".
> > (we have dominfo, domstate, ...).
> >
> > Same odd commad name is "dumpxml"... XML of what? It should be
> > renamed to "domdump".
>
> Well we can't break API - and there's a whole bunch of commands which
> don't start with 'dom' prefix - pause, shutdown, create, resume, vcpuinfo,
> setmem, setmaxmem, to name just a few - apart from nodeinfo & create
> essentially every command performs some kinda of operation on a domain.
> So I think needing to prefix all with 'dom' is a little overkill.
OK. Agree.
> I agree that 'genxml' is a terrible name I suggest though - domgen is
> nicer - or as below - just allow the args to be passed to regular create
> command instead of an XML file path.
I think the args for the create command is nice solution, but domgen
too. We should support both. I will be very happy with something
like:
virsh domgen -name Foo -m 256 -hda image.dsk > /etc/xen/Foo.xml
> > I can imagine more commands like:
> >
> > virsh> bufread /etc/xen/Foo.xml
> > virsh> bufedit Foo -hdc /path/file.img
> > virsh> create --frombuf Foo
> >
> > I think it could be nice for playful admins and developers. Or is
> > over engineering? ;-)
>
> A little over-engineering - if we want to let people override contents of
> an XML file - i'd just combine both into one, eg
>
> virsh create -hda /path/file.img /etc/xen/Foo.xml
Good idea.
Karel
--
Karel Zak <kzak@xxxxxxxxxx>