On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 05:26:45PM +0200, Daniel Veillard wrote:
On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 12:11:26PM +0200, Matthias Bolte wrote:
One problem here is the essential guestOS field of the VMX config, see http://sanbarrow.com/vmx/vmx-guestos.html . For a first try I would set it to 'other' by default, because there is currently no field available in the domain XML to map this information to. But to allow the user to set this filed, I would want to extend to domain XML definition in order to reuse existing code. So how would I do this?
Hum, that need to be though out a bit, as we do the same kind of things at the higher level (e.g. virt-install) and then convert that to various tweaks in the XML. I think Cole was starting to write a library to ease making per OS guest definitions, maybe we need to bring this down to libvirt level. I doubt the format at the XML level will be very hard, it's more a problem of making the information database available globally for the whole stack, either within libvirt or as a component that can be called consistently from top to bottom.
Currently I'm just using the virDomainDef struct and the related parse and format functions. One option would be to add a guest field to the virDomainOSDef struct and extend the parse and format functions to handle it. The parse and format functions take flags already, so a flag could be added to indicate if the guest field should be handled or not (just like the VMX extension for the virConfParser).
Yes extending the Def and the XML (and RNG) syntax are things which are rather simple but we need to provide this in a consistant way, and that call to an API extension or a separate library. but we don't need this in a first step to build a first version of the ESX driver.
Yes, Cole got a start on the library, got some feedback from various folks, but I don't know what the current status is. We also need this for oVirt and for various other interesting libguestfs interactions (virt-inspector...). If you think it's in scope for libvirt I would love to have it there, it would make things easier for us. --Hugh