On 06/23/2011 06:38 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 12:08:26PM +0100, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 10:29 AM, Alon Levy<al...@redhat.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 01:55:25PM -0500, Michael Roth wrote:
Goal:
Provide a mechanism, similar to vmware and virtualbox guest tools
ISOs, that allows us to easily distribute guest tools (and
potentially drivers) for linux and windows guests.
What would be the advantage for linux guests, with their package managers
already
handling this task? I see how it would make testing easier with various linux
distributions, but for management I wonder if it won't be easier to use the
package management system to update the guests same as the hosts.
If the guest tools come from the host QEMU we don't need complicated
compatibility testing and fallbacks. Guest and host will be in sync
and support the same features.
I'm not sure how we can update guest tools when the QEMU on the host
is updated though.
While an ISO is a good option for the initial deployment, since it can
be used to provide both the virtio drivers + agents together, once you
have the virtio stuff installed in the guest, it might be worth exposing
updated tools via a 9p filesystem mount. For Linux guest the 9p fs
exposed could include a YUM repo (or equiv) which the guest update tool
would automatically see and pull updates from, since 9pfs is "live"
unlike an ISO.
Regards,
Daniel
Definitely, or at least some form of automating the install beyond the
initial one. One approach would be extending the guest RPC agent that
would ship with the ISO to be able to kick off a future update.
Implementing in would be pretty simple too:
Guest agent: add RPC will execute the ISO installer
QMP: add command that will mount latest ISO as a cdrom then initiate the
update via the guest agent RPC.
We could even take the ISO out of the equation after the initial
install, since files can be pushed to the guest via guest
agent/virtio-serial
