Re: [libvirt] esx driver: XML format for guest OS type/variant

On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 11:54:11AM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 12:47:34PM +0100, Matthias Bolte wrote: > > 2011/1/13 Richard W.M. Jones <rjones(a)redhat.com&gt;: > > > It's probably impossible from the ESX driver itself, but you could run > > > virt-inspector on the domain and translate the result into a suitable > > > guestOS string.  virt-inspector supports a large proportion of the > > > OSes listed. > > > > That won't work in general, as you want to set the guest OS type in > > the VMX config before you install the guest OS. > > So you're stuck with modelling it in the libvirt XML somehow. > > I will just add that a current RFE is to make virt-inspector work on > install CDs. The idea is in virt-manager that we have it > automatically fill in the OS hints based on the ISO you try to use. What we're trying todo with libosinfo is to kind of reverse the current approach, so we don't need any probing at all. The libosinfo database will actually contain metadata about where the install media can be obtained (admin specified local ISO/URL paths, and/or some default internet URL install paths, etc). Currently virt-manager asks the user to fill in a ISO path or URL for their OS, and then probes it to find out what type of OS. With libosinfo integrated, the user would simply be shown a list of OS, and pick one off the list. Then virt-manager would query libosinfo to find out the URL/ISO path and all the hardware support metadata associated with it without needing to probe.