libguestfs for EPEL 5 ===================== by Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@redhat.com> 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. 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. - 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 <