Thanks for responding.

Since I want to work with online guests, unfortunately libguestfs is not an option for me. (Otherwise, I might have used virt-copy-in to copy the files into guest).

But, for my understanding, please let me know how such things can be done in QEMU environment. Basically, how can we do following.

    1. take some bulky file from host to guest
    2. perform some operation on that file
    3. get the result of that operation.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
~Puneet




On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 7:35 PM, Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com> wrote:
On 06/12/2014 07:59 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 04:15:01PM +0530, Puneet Bakshi wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I want to be able to install RPM packages (available in host system at some
>> path) to the guest VM and want this facility to be available as a tool.

Libguestfs can already do this for offline guests.  I'd suggest looking
into using that, rather than waiting for qemu's guest-agent to be taught
a new command for manipulating live guests.


>
> The general mindset of the QEMU community is to not turn the QEMU
> guest agent into a general systems management tool. It aims to just
> restrict itself to the functionality required for core virtualization
> management tools. So RPM install is out of scope really
>
> If you want general systems management facilities, such as RPM
> installation, then there's countless existing tools for the job
> that are preferrable to reinventing the wheel. eg func, puppet,
> chef, ansible, and many many more.

There has been talk of adding a generic qemu guest-agent command for
spawning an arbitrary command, but no patches so far (in part because
libguestfs doing the same functionality for offline guests has been
sufficient).

--
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org