libguestfs for EPEL 5 ===================== by Richard W.M. Jones This package contains modern libguestfs for EPEL 5. Although libguestfs is supplied in RHEL 5, the version supplied is very old and is only intended to be used with virt-v2v from RHEL 5. It is only available in the RHEL-5-V2V channel. Therefore there exists a need for a modern libguestfs for RHEL 5 users. This package supplies this through the community-supported EPEL repository. (1) Installation ---------------- After enabling the EPEL repository, install libguestfs in the normal way using yum. It appears that yum from RHEL 5 cannot resolve the complicated upgrade from old libguestfs to this version, so you may need to do: yum remove libguestfs # remove old packages yum install libguestfs [etc] Note that only x86-64 packages are available. 32 bit packages cannot be supplied because there is no 32 bit KVM on RHEL 5. No post-installation configuration should be needed. You must have a non-Xen kernel installed on the host. Note that the non-Xen kernel just needs to be installed, it does *not* need to be running (you can run libguestfs under Xen if you want). The non-Xen kernel is used to boot the libguestfs appliance. You must use this package together with the version of qemu-kvm from RHEL 5 (usually called 'kvm-83-NNN.el5'). Alternate versions of qemu, KVM, using $LIBGUESTFS_QEMU or QEMU wrappers, will probably not work. Hardware virtualization will greatly improve the performance of libguestfs, but it is not required. libguestfs cannot use hardware virtualization when run in a Xen domain (not even dom0). For more performance tips, read guestfs-performance(1). (2) Getting help ---------------- This package is supported voluntarily by the EPEL community and by the upstream libguestfs maintainers. It is *not* supported by Red Hat. It *cannot* be used with the virt-v2v package from RHEL 5. If you need to use virt-v2v on RHEL 5, use the libguestfs package from the same RHN channel. However we would advise you to use RHEL 6 or later because that version of virt-v2v is substantially more powerful. To get help with this package, contact the libguestfs maintainers. See http://libguestfs.org for links to the mailing list, IRC, and how to file bugs. (3) Features not available -------------------------- The following features are not compatible with RHEL 5 and have been either removed completely or disabled: - PHP bindings - GObject, GObject introspection, anything that uses GObject Introspection such as the Javascript bindings - Erlang bindings - The btrfs filesystem. - guestfs_fstrim - guestfs_wipefs - Various APIs that take UUIDs (eg. guestfs_mkswap_U) - virtio-scsi - Internationalization of any non-C programs. - Japanese and Ukrainian man pages. - guestfs_vfs_label cannot read labels from NTFS filesystems. - guestfs_blkid may return fewer fields than expected on a more modern Linux system. - guestfs_txz_in and guestfs_txz_out are not implemented. - guestfs_utimens doesn't let you set the time on a symbolic link (this is a limitation of the RHEL 5 kernel). - guestfs_mkswap_label followed by guestfs_swapon_label does not work. The reasons are not well understood. - Adding drives using non-virtio-blk interfaces. - The 'ntfsclone_*' APIs only partially work. In particular, the 'metadataonly' flag is not working, and maybe other parts of this API won't work. (4) Features that may not work ------------------------------ The following features may not work fully in this version of libguestfs: - LUKS (encrypted filesystems within guests) - MD (RAID devices within guests) - FUSE, guestmount, the mount-local API. These appear to have some problems because of the older version of FUSE in RHEL 5. - virt-sysprep '--script' option (because it requires FUSE). (5) Other notes --------------- An artificial pause of 1 second has been added after unmounting any filesystem. *Without* the 1 second pause, the following test case will fail sometimes: guestfish <