| guestfs-release-notes-1.22(1) | Virtualization Support | guestfs-release-notes-1.22(1) |
guestfs-release-notes - libguestfs Release Notes
These release notes only cover the differences from the previous stable/dev branch split (1.20.0). For detailed changelogs, please see the git repository, or the ChangeLog file distributed in the tarball.
API
Remote access to disks:
The SYSLINUX and EXTLINUX bootloaders can now be installed in disk images using the API.
Inspection can now handle filesystems such as btrfs where subvolumes are separately mountable (Matthew Booth).
"Attach methods" are now known as "backends". Compatibility with existing code is preserved.
Filenames can contain ':', as long as newer QEMU is being used.
Tools
Virt-alignment-scan and virt-df scan multiple guests in parallel.
Guestmount now passes errno accurately back to userspace in almost all cases.
Guestfish and other tools can now use a URI-like syntax to access remote disks, eg:
guestfish -a ssh://example.com/path/to/disk.img
Guestfish and guestmount now allow you to specify the filesystem type when mounting, which is more secure (Dave Vasilevsky).
Guestfish is now the "guest filesystem shell".
Guestfish allows only 1 "true" "t" "yes" "y" "on" 0 "false" "f" "no" "n" "off" for boolean values (case insensitive), and gives an error for all other strings.
New tool "guestunmount" for unmounting FUSE filesystems safely.
"guestmount --no-fork" flag prevents guestmount from daemonizing.
Virt-resize now uses sparse copies by default, saving considerable space for guests which are mostly empty.
Bash tab completion has been rewritten and can now handle most tools, and correctly tab-complete "--long" options. In addition, bash completion scripts are loaded on demand.
Language bindings
The Java API now supports events.
The Python object now inherits from the "object" base class.
Python methods which previously returned lists of tuples can now be made to return a Python dict. For backwards compatibility, you have to enable this by using the constructor option "guestfs.GuestFS (python_return_dict=True)".
The PHP bindings are now tested properly, and have had multiple fixes.
The long-deprecated Perl "Sys::Guestfs::Lib" library has been removed. https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2013-April/msg00001.html
Examples
New example program showing how to enable debugging and capture log messages.
Other
Distributors can add arbitrary extra packages to the appliance by doing:
./configure --with-extra-packages="list of package names"
Distributors can use:
./configure --with-supermin-extra-options="..."
to add arbitrary extra options to supermin.
No security issues were found in this release.
cp-r extlinux feature-available get-program is-whole-device part-get-gpt-type part-set-gpt-type rename set-program syslinux
C only:
guestfs_event_to_string
The febootstrap tool has now been renamed to "supermin". Libguestfs can use either, but now prefers "supermin". http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/supermin/
libxml2 is required to build libguestfs.
The hivexregedit program (from hivex) is required to build from git.
Internal functions can no longer be used unless the caller defines "-DGUESTFS_PRIVATE=1".
Enable C compiler warnings in Python, Ruby bindings.
Fail early and clearly if libvirt does not support qemu/KVM (eg. if default libvirt connection is to Xen).
"make print-subdirs" rule, useful for selectively running tests.
Multiple fixes to allow separated (sourcedir != builddir) builds.
Multiple fixes to Haskell bindings.
"ln" and "ln-f" APIs now capture "errno" correctly.
Language binding tests use (mostly) a standard numbering scheme and aim to test the same range of features in each language. Also the number of launches required has been reduced so these tests should run much more quickly.
Library code internally uses GCC "__attribute__((cleanup))" (if available) to simplify memory allocation.
Internal header files have been reorganized. See the comments in src/guestfs-internal*.h
Internal code shared between the library and certain tools is now located in a static "libutils" library.
Almost all subdirectories can now use parallel builds, although note that the top-level directories still build in series.
Use of "PATH_MAX" and "NAME_MAX" has been eliminated from the code.
The Java API now requires JVM ≥ 1.6.
Force use of "serial-tests" with automake ≥ 1.12.
Use of sockets in the library protocol layer is abstracted, allowing other non-POSIX layers to be added in future (see src/conn-socket.c).
"qemu-img info --output json" is used if available, for more secure parsing of the output of this command.
Distros can now use "make INSTALLDIRS=vendor install" to place Ruby bindings in vendordir. This eliminates a non-upstream patch carried by both Fedora and Debian.
Valgrind log files are now written to tmp/valgrind-DATE-PID.log
"make clean" cleans the local "tmp/" directory.
The C API tests have been rewritten using a more flexible generator language that allows arbitrary C code to be executing during tests.
guestfs-examples(1), guestfs-faq(1), guestfs-performance(1), guestfs-recipes(1), guestfs-testing(1), guestfs(3), guestfish(1), http://libguestfs.org/
Richard W.M. Jones
Copyright (C) 2009-2020 Red Hat Inc.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.
To get a list of bugs against libguestfs, use this link: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?component=libguestfs&product=Virtualization+Tools
To report a new bug against libguestfs, use this link: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?component=libguestfs&product=Virtualization+Tools
When reporting a bug, please supply:
| 2021-01-05 | libguestfs-1.44.0 |