Hi all, I'd like to drop some uncommonly used features from virt-manager/virt-install. Comments welcome * non-virDomainOpenConsole serial console in virtManager/serialcon.py. qemu, libxl, bhyve, lxc all support this API, qemu since libvirt 0.8.6 in Nov 2010. Directly connecting to /dev/ptsX only works for virt-manager if using qemu:///session or if using qemu:///system and running the app as root. It's not much code to maintain but it's hard to test and I don't think anyone will miss it, so I'd like to remove it. * --location nfs handling. You can pass an nfs: or nfs:// URL to virt-install/virt-manager, it will try to mount it, then treat it as an install tree and pull out kernel/initrd per usual. I doubt anyone uses this with virt-manager since it would require running the UI as root. People are possibly using this with virt-install though. I think 10 years ago it was more common to do at least RH distro installs over NFS, but I hear very little about usage of this nowadays, and I think most NFS servers probably have http exports as well. NFS mounting is tough to test and annoying to handle in the code, and inflexible in that the user can't pass in mount options. If someone is dependent on it they can manually make it work by mounting the share, doing --location /path/to/mount/point, and use --extra-args to specify method=/repo= kernel option for RH distros. * --cdrom $location installs. Did you know you can do virt-install --cdrom http://mirrors.mit.edu/centos/7/os/x86_64/ and we will fetch a boot.iso, save it to a tempfile, boot the VM from it, then delete the ISO? Probably not. I think this is a leftover from the old old days when xen HVM could only boot off cdrom but not kernel/initrd. if you are going the route of specifying an install tree url, kernel/initrd via --location is superior (at least for RH distros) since you can easily pass in kernel options like install parameters and kickstart files, and it's less stuff to download. As a workaround, if I remove this I'll wire up --cdrom to handle http paths directly to an ISO and the VM accesses it directly; this works with qemu+libvirt for a few years now. Dropping this saves a decent chunk of code and test cases from the URL test suite matrix. * packagekit package install support. On first run of the app we will check to see if libvirt and qemu are installed, and if not, offer to install them. In theory anyways. In practice this stuff breaks repeatedly and is a pain to test because every desktop has their own API provider with subtly different behavior. My last round of testing about 6 months ago: apper on KDE was completely busted and apparently unmaintained although I see some dev activity recently, gnome-software is the latest packagekit provider on gnome and completely changes the semantics of the API compared to old style gnome-packagekit that break a lot of virt-manager assumptions.. So I'm tired of it and want it all gone. Plus on Fedora at least we finally have weak RPM deps which all this was largely made to work around. So if anyone will miss any of these features, please state your case so we can discuss. Otherwise they will be removed before the next release Thanks, Cole _______________________________________________ virt-tools-list mailing list virt-tools-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/virt-tools-list
