We are pleased to announce the next stable release of libguestfs, tools and a library for accessing, creating and modifying the contents of virtual machines and disk images.
Home page: http://libguestfs.org/
Binary packages for: Fedora: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=8391 Debian: http://libguestfs.org/download/binaries/debian-packages/ Ubuntu: http://libguestfs.org/download/binaries/ubuntu-packages/ RHEL 6: http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/rhel6.1-libguestfs-preview/ (soon)
Here are the release notes (also at http://libguestfs.org/RELEASE-NOTES.txt )
Release notes for libguestfs 1.8.0 ----------------------------------
These release notes only cover the differences from the previous stable/dev branch split (1.6.0). For detailed changelogs, please see the git repository, or the ChangeLog file distributed in the tarball.
New features
- Support and packages for Debian and Ubuntu.
- Daily builds from git repository on Debian and Ubuntu to reduce risk of regressions.
- Port to ArchLinux 'pacman' (thanks Thomas S Hatch).
- The following tools have been rewritten in C (originally in Perl):
. virt-cat . virt-df . virt-inspector . virt-ls . virt-rescue
- Some C tools support encrypted guests automatically. This is supported in: guestfish, guestmount, virt-cat, virt-inspector, virt-ls.
- New tool virt-filesystems (in C) which is a replacement for virt-list-filesystems and virt-list-partitions, and has a superset of the functionality of those tools.
- guestfish, guestmount and the C tools use unified command line option parsing, so they support many common options such as '-a disk.img', '-d libvirt-domain', '-x', '-v'. The old command line option parsing is preserved for compatibility in scripts etc.
- guestfish no longer has any dependencies on Perl
- New man pages containing programming examples: guestfs-examples(3) (C/C++), guestfs-ocaml(3), guestfs-python(3), guestfs-ruby(3).
- Trace mode prints return values from API functions.
- virt-inspector can list applications installed in Windows guests, along with a great deal of information about those applications.
- Add support for inspecting: Linux Mint, Mandriva, FreeBSD.
- guestfish --rw option (with no effect currently) to make potentially dangerous write access explicit.
- guestfish --listen --csh for compatibility with csh, tcsh (thanks Eric Blake).
- The first upstream version that introduced each API function is now documented in guestfs(3).
- guestfs_last_errno allows you to retrieve the errno from the daemon, correctly translated to the local operating system.
- Functions can now have optional parameters.
- Progress bars and progress notifications can now happen for upload commands.
- Appliance builder more careful about not leaving temporary files around in /tmp.
- getfattr/setfattr commands added to virt-rescue.
- ROADMAP file covers roadmap and goals for future releases.
Security
- New SECURITY section in guestfs(3) API documentation.
- virt-inspector no longer runs any guest commands.
- Inspection code is more careful about avoiding very large files from guests which might previously have caused a denial of service.
- FUSE calls into guestmount are now traced when using guestmount -x.
New APIs
- add-domain - add-drive-opts - getxattr - inspect-get-hostname - inspect-get-package-format - inspect-get-package-management - inspect-get-roots - inspect-list-applications - lgetxattr - mkfs-opts
Internals
- C programs now only link precisely with the libraries that they use.
- PCRE, libmagic, hivex and libvirt libraries are now completely optional for building.
- Multiple memory leaks and file descriptor leaks fixed.
- Add a POD wrapper to unify generation of man pages and HTML files across all programs.
- Source includes phony images of Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu and Windows guests.
- Ruby bindings have 'make install' rule.
- <guestfs.h> is now a single file.
- <guestfs.h> does not require XDR headers.
- ocaml xml-light library is no longer required to build (thanks Maxim Koltsov).
- ./configure --disable-[...] for each language binding (thanks Maxim Koltsov).
- Old ocaml-viewer program removed (use guestfs-browser instead).
- New C API test type 'InitScratchFS' makes the tests run a little more quickly.
- Excluded packages in the appliance are now listed in a separate file appliance/excludelist.in, and can be customized per-distro.
Bugs fixed
- 663407 readlink and readlinklist returns /sysroot/ in some paths - 661280 virt-rescue: panic when shutting down: "/sbin/reboot: No such file or directory" - 657499 checksum: wrong check sum type causes umount to fail - 655554 Whole disk paths are not made canonical by virt-inspector - 654638 openssl updated to 1.0.0b libguestfs depends on exact file names - 652796 ruby bindings not installed by 'make install', hence omitted from the binary distribution
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Richard W.M. Jones