Re: [fedora-virt] [Libguestfs] ANNOUNCE: libguestfs 1.26 released

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 10:26:42PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>  I'm pleased to announce libguestfs 1.26, a library and set of
> tools
>  for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images.  This release
>  took more than 6 months of work by a considerable number of people,
>  and has many new features (see release notes below).
>  
>  You can get libguestfs 1.26 here:
>  
>  Main website:     http://libguestfs.org/
>  
>        Source:     http://libguestfs.org/download/1.26-stable/
>                    You will also need latest supermin from here:
>                    http://libguestfs.org/download/supermin/
>  
>  Fedora 20/21:     http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=8391
>                    It will appear as an update for F20 in about a week. 
Fedora 20 users can test and give feedback here:

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/libguestfs-1.26.0-1.fc20,supermin...

>  Debian/experimental coming soon, see:
>                    https://packages.debian.org/experimental/libguestfs0
>  
>  The Fedora and Debian packages have split dependencies so you can
>  download just the features you need.
>  
>  From http://libguestfs.org/guestfs-release-notes.1.html :
>  
>  RELEASE NOTES FOR LIBGUESTFS 1.26
>  
>   New features
>  
>    Tools
>  
>      virt-customize(1) is a new tool for customizing virtual machine disk
>      images. It lets you install packages, edit configuration files, run
>      scripts, set passwords and so on. virt-builder(1) and virt-sysprep(1)
>      use virt-customize, and command line options across all these tools are
>      now identical.
>  
>      virt-diff(1) is a new tool for showing the differences between the
>      filesystems of two virtual machines. It is mainly useful when showing
>      what files have been changed between snapshots.
>  
>      virt-builder(1) has been greatly enhanced. There are many more ways to
>      customize the virtual machine. It can pull templates from multiple
>      repositories. A parallelized internal xzcat implementation speeds up
>      template decompression. Virt-builder uses an optimizing planner to
>      choose the fastest way to build the VM. It is now easier to use
>      virt-builder from other programs. Internationalization support has been
>      added to metadata. More efficient SELinux relabelling of files. Can
>      build guests for multiple architectures. Error messages have been
>      improved. (Pino Toscano)
>  
>      virt-sparsify(1) has a new --in-place option. This sparsifies an image
>      in place (without copying it) and is also much faster. (Lots of help
>      provided by Paolo Bonzini)
>  
>      virt-sysprep(1) can delete and scrub files under user control. You can
>      lock user accounts or set random passwords on accounts. Can remove more
>      log files. Can unsubscribe a guest from Red Hat Subscription Manager.
>      New flexible way to enable and disable operations. (Wanlong Gao, Pino
>      Toscano)
>  
>      virt-win-reg(1) allows you to use URIs to specify remote disk images.
>  
>      virt-format(1) can now pass the extra space that it recovers back to
>      the host.
>  
>      guestfish(1) has additional environment variables to give fine control
>      over the ><fs> prompt. Guestfish reads its (rarely used) configuration
>      file in a different order now so that local settings override global
>      settings. (Pino Toscano)
>  
>      virt-make-fs(1) was rewritten in C, but is unchanged in terms of
>      functionality and command line usage.
>  
>    Language bindings
>  
>      The OCaml bindings have a new Guestfs.Errno module, used to check the
>      error number returned by Guestfs.last_errno.
>  
>      PHP tests now work. (Pino Toscano)
>  
>    Inspection
>  
>      Inspection can recognize Debian live images.
>  
>    Architectures
>  
>      ARMv7 (32 bit) now supports KVM acceleration.
>  
>      Aarch64 (ARM 64 bit) is supported, but the appliance part does not work
>      yet.
>  
>      PPC64 support has been fixed and enhanced.
>  
>   Security
>  
>      Denial of service when inspecting disk images with corrupt btrfs
>      volumes
>  
>        It was possible to crash libguestfs (and programs that use libguestfs
>        as a library) by presenting a disk image containing a corrupt btrfs
>        volume.
>  
>        This was caused by a NULL pointer dereference causing a denial of
>        service, and is not thought to be exploitable any further.
>  
>        See commit d70ceb4cbea165c960710576efac5a5716055486 for the fix. This
>        fix is included in libguestfs stable branches ≥ 1.26.0, ≥ 1.24.6 and
>        ≥ 1.22.8, and also in RHEL ≥ 7.0. Earlier versions of libguestfs are
>        not vulnerable.
>  
>      Better generation of random root passwords and random seeds
>  
>        When generating random root passwords and random seeds, two bugs were
>        fixed which are possibly security related. Firstly we no longer read
>        excessive bytes from /dev/urandom (most of which were just thrown
>        away). Secondly we changed the code to avoid modulo bias. These
>        issues were not thought to be exploitable. (Both changes suggested by
>        Edwin Török)
>  
>   API
>  
>      GUID parameters are now validated when they are passed to API calls,
>      whereas previously you could have passed any string. (Pino Toscano)
>  
>    New APIs
>  
>      guestfs_add_drive_opts: new discard parameter
>  
>        The new discard parameter allows fine-grained control over
>        discard/trim support for a particular disk. This allows the host file
>        to become more sparse (or thin-provisioned) when you delete files or
>        issue the guestfs_fstrim API call.
>  
>      guestfs_add_domain: new parameters: cachemode, discard
>  
>        These parameters are passed through when adding the domain's disks.
>  
>      guestfs_blkdiscard
>  
>        Discard all blocks on a guestfs device. Combined with the discard
>        parameter above, this makes the host file sparse.
>  
>      guestfs_blkdiscardzeroes
>  
>        Test if discarded blocks read back as zeroes.
>  
>      guestfs_compare_*
>  
>      guestfs_copy_*
>  
>        For each struct returned through the API, libguestfs now generates
>        guestfs_compare_* and guestfs_copy_* functions to allow you to
>        compare and copy structs.
>  
>      guestfs_copy_attributes
>  
>        Copy attributes (like permissions, xattrs, ownership) from one file
>        to another. (Pino Toscano)
>  
>      guestfs_disk_create
>  
>        A flexible API for creating empty disk images from scratch. This
>        avoids the need to call out to external programs like qemu-img(1).
>  
>      guestfs_get_backend_settings
>  
>      guestfs_set_backend_settings
>  
>        Per-backend settings (can also be set via the environment variable
>        LIBGUESTFS_BACKEND_SETTINGS). The main use for this is forcing TCG
>        mode in the qemu-based backends, for example:
>  
>         export LIBGUESTFS_BACKEND=direct
>         export LIBGUESTFS_BACKEND_SETTINGS=force_tcg
>  
>      guestfs_part_get_name
>  
>        Get the label or name of a partition (for GPT disk images).
>  
>   Build changes
>  
>      The following extra packages are required to build libguestfs 1.26:
>  
>      supermin ≥ 5
>  
>        Supermin version 5 is required to build this version of libguestfs.
>  
>      flex, bison
>  
>        Virt-builder now uses a real parser to parse its metadata file, so
>        these tools are required.
>  
>      xz
>  
>        This is now a required build dependency, where previously it was (in
>        theory) optional.
>  
>   Internals
>  
>      PO message extraction rewritten to be more robust. (Pino Toscano)
>  
>      podwrapper gives an error if the --insert or --verbatim argument
>      pattern is not found.
>  
>      Libguestfs now passes the qemu -enable-fips option to enable FIPS, if
>      qemu supports it.
>  
>      ./configure --without-qemu can be used if you don't want to specify a
>      default hypervisor.
>  
>      Copy-on-write [COW] overlays, used for example for read-only drives,
>      are now created through an internal backend API (.create_cow_overlay).
>  
>      Libvirt backend uses some funky C macros to generate XML. These are
>      simpler and safer.
>  
>      The ChangeLog file format has changed. It is now just the same as git
>      log, instead of using a custom format.
>  
>      Appliance start-up has changed:
>  
>        * The libguestfs appliance now initializes LVM the same way as it is
>        done on physical machines.
>  
>        * The libguestfs appliance does not write an empty string to
>        /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug when starting up.
>  
>        Note that you must configure your kernel to have
>        CONFIG_UEVENT_HELPER_PATH="" otherwise you will get strange LVM
>        errors (this applies as much to any Linux machine, not just
>        libguestfs). (Peter Rajnoha)
>  
>      Libguestfs can now be built on arches that have ocamlc(1) but not
>      ocamlopt(1). (Hilko Bengen, Olaf Hering)
>  
>      You cannot use ./configure --disable-daemon --enable-appliance. It made
>      no sense anyway. Now it is expressly forbidden by the configure script.
>  
>      The packagelist file uses m4 for macro expansion instead of cpp.
>  
>   Bugs fixed
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1073906
>  
>        java bindings inspect_list_applications2 throws
>        java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException:
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1063374
>  
>        [RFE] enable subscription manager clean or unregister operation to
>        sysprep
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1060404
>  
>        virt-resize does not preserve GPT partition names
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1057504
>  
>        mount-local should give a clearer error if root is not mounted
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1056290
>  
>        virt-sparsify overwrites block devices if used as output files
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1055452
>  
>        libguestfs: error: invalid backend: appliance
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1054761
>  
>        guestfs_pvs prints "unknown device" if a physical volume is missing
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1053847
>  
>        Recommended default clock/timer settings
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1046509
>  
>        ruby-libguestfs throws "expecting 0 or 1 arguments" on
>        Guestfs::Guestfs.new
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1045450
>  
>        Cannot inspect cirros 0.3.1 disk image fully
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1045033
>  
>        LIBVIRT_DEFAULT_URI=qemu:///system breaks libguestfs
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1044585
>  
>        virt-builder network (eg. --install) doesn't work if resolv.conf sets
>        nameserver 127.0.0.1
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1044014
>  
>        When SSSD is installed, libvirt configuration requires
>        authentication, but not clear to user
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1039995
>  
>        virt-make-fs fails making fat/vfat whole disk: Device partition
>        expected, not making filesystem on entire device '/dev/sda' (use -I
>        to override)
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1039540
>  
>        virt-sysprep to delete more logfiles
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1033207
>  
>        RFE: libguestfs inspection does not recognize Free4NAS live CD
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1028660
>  
>        RFE: virt-sysprep/virt-builder should have an option to lock a user
>        account
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1026688
>  
>        libguestfs fails examining libvirt guest with ceph drives: rbd: image
>        name must begin with a '/'
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1022431
>  
>        virt-builder fails if $HOME/.cache doesn't exist
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1022184
>  
>        libguestfs: do not use versioned jar file
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1020806
>  
>        All libguestfs LVM operations fail on Debian/Ubuntu
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1008417
>  
>        Need update helpout of part-set-gpt-type
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/953907
>  
>        virt-sysprep does not correctly set the hostname on Debian/Ubuntu
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/923355
>  
>        guestfish prints literal "\n" in error messages
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/660687
>  
>        guestmount: "touch" command fails: touch: setting times of
>        `timestamp': Invalid argument
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/593511
>  
>        [RFE] function to get partition name
>  
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/563450
>  
>        list-devices returns devices of different types out of order 
Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines.  Tiny program with many
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