On Tue, Sep 03, 2013 at 11:30:07PM -0600, Mike Latimer wrote: > On Tuesday, September 03, 2013 06:09:26 PM Mike Latimer wrote: > > However, as mentioned in the bug, this parameter is likely no longer > > required. Unless there is a use-case where this setting is required, it > > seems like a good idea to remove it completely (which should work in > > either libvirt or direct mode), rather than recommend the workaround. > > As much as I hate to reply to myself... I just did some additional testing > and > realized that if 'iface:ide' is removed, the disks could be inaccessible in > environments that don't have virtio_scsi (in the guestfs environment). In > other words, with just ata_piix, the 'iface:ide' might be required.
I'll give you a bit of background to this (mis-)feature. The "iface" optional argument was added so that you could use qemu's IDE interface instead of whatever the default is (virtio-scsi, falling back to virtio-blk). This has no effect (only limitations) for ordinary libguestfs users, but for virt-v2v it allows us to run the 'mkinitrd' command in the guest and have it work for very old and buggy mkinitrd / guests that got confused by virtio. I think it was for RHEL 4 ... What it does do is cause endless problems, mainly because people want to use virt-v2v with more disks than IDE allows (just 2, once you take into account the transfer disk and the libguestfs appliance). So I wouldn't worry about removing iface => "ide". > Do we know if there are any environments which are commonly missing > the virtio stack? Even ARM has it these days. libguestfs doesn't work without it. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines. Tiny program with many powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc. http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top _______________________________________________ Libguestfs mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/libguestfs
