Re: [libvirt] [virt-tools-list] Tracking VM installations
On Thu, Jul 05, 2012 at 04:49:49AM +0300, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 12:09 AM, Richard W.M. Jones
<rjones(a)redhat.com> wrote:
> You can use libguestfs (specifically, virt-df) to display the amount
> of disk space used in the guest.
For target disk, we use libvirt's storage volume API and that provides
us API to get current allocation.
libvirt storage API gives you a different number (blocks allocated) so
it won't work for VMs backed with LVs or preallocated files. virt-df
looks inside the filesystem(s). However a guest agent will give you
the most accurate figures when the guest is running, and I imagine a
guest agent may even be able to query the installer somehow.
> Finally I've always thought it would be a good idea if
guests
> communicated information down to the host about progress, whether that
> is progress booting or progress installing. There is (on PC hardware)
> even an I/O port reserved for this purpose (port 0x80)! You'd have to
> get buy-in and get it upstream in qemu and every installer out there.
>
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6793899/what-does-the-0x80-port-addres...
That would indeed be awesome but it seems way too much work and fight
(not to mention, its impossible to fix this in proprietary OSs if they
don't already support this) for just one progress bar.
I wouldn't necessarily discount this one. It's a standard of sorts,
and useful in other scenarios that we very much care about,
eg. getting a libvirt event when a guest has started booting, finished
booting, is ready for login, etc.
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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