As observed in this thread: https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2008-July/msg00215.html several tools need to grab the complete list of domains frequently (eg. virt-manager and virt-top) and the way they do it currently is very inefficient, both in terms of the number of round-trips in the remote case (4 + 2*N calls), and the fact that we could implement drivers better if we could get all domains in a single operation. Therefore this patch adds the virConnectListAllDomains call: int virConnectListAllDomains (virConnectPtr conn, virDomainPtr **domains, virDomainInfo **infos, int stateflags); This call gets domains and virDomainInfo structures. The reasons for getting the info structures as well are that we get them anyway as a side-effect of filtering on state, and virsh, virt-top and virt-manager all get the info structures at the same time as getting the domains. As in Dan's proposal above, you can filter on state, with three special values (VIR_DOMAIN_LIST_ACTIVE, VIR_DOMAIN_LIST_INACTIVE and VIR_DOMAIN_LIST_ALL) which do what you think. virConnectListAllDomains is always available. If the driver doesn't implement it directly, then we emulate it in src/libvirt.c. This ensures that virt-manager etc can start to use this call straightaway. There is no direct implementation for Xen or QEMU yet. (If the general patch is accepted, then I'll implement at least for QEMU). However there is already a benefit to applying this patch because it optimizes the remote case from 4 + 2*N calls down to 1. There is no Python binding yet. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat http://et.redhat.com/~rjones Read my OCaml programming blog: http://camltastic.blogspot.com/ Fedora now supports 64 OCaml packages (the OPEN alternative to F#) http://cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_red_hat_and_fedora