On Wed, Jul 04, 2012 at 10:45:29PM +0300, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote: > Hi,

> We have a requirement in Boxes for showing progress bars on VMs under > installation: > > https://github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/raw/master/boxes/boxes... > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679107 > > However, we are bit clueless on how that could be achieved. The only > idea I have is to know the number of passes (reboots) and typical disk > usage in each pass for "every" (we only do this for express installs > so we don't need this for all) OS and estimate the progress based on > that knowledge. If that idea is worth looking into, we'll need this > information in libosinfo and hence me cross-posting this to > virt-tools-list. > > Other ideas welcome! Keep in mind that we don't need to be very > accurate, just accurate enough to not annoy the user. It's a tricky one :-)

You can take a screenshot of the guest (assuming a visual installation).  Oz does this.  Displaying an icon-sized screenshot might be a surrogate for displaying a progress bar, since many installers will display a progress bar themselves. https://github.com/clalancette/oz/blob/74d99497840e3bade4d679ed94cf9a4628...

You can use libguestfs (specifically, virt-df) to display the amount of disk space used in the guest.

 For many installers, disk space will monotonically increase as it proceeds, although of course you've no idea what the final disk usage will be.  You can turn this into a pulse-mode progress bar. http://libguestfs.org/virt-df.1.html

Oz also uses network and disk activity to tell if the installer is making progress. https://github.com/clalancette/oz/blob/74d99497840e3bade4d679ed94cf9a4628...

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. ttp://stackoverflow.com/questions/6793899/what-does-the-0x80-port-address...

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&gt; 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.