[fedora-virt] [ANNOUNCE] libguestfs 1.14 released - tools for managing virtual machines and disk images

[Richard W.M. Jones]

libguestfs is a library and a set of tools for reading, writing,
managing, inspecting, rescuing, resizing and aligning disk images,
and offline and live virtual machines.

I'm pleased to announce the release of libguestfs 1.14, the next
stable release of libguestfs.  There are many changes and new features
in this release -- see below.

You can get source and binaries from the website:

  http://libguestfs.org/
  Source:       http://libguestfs.org/download/1.14-stable/
  Fedora:       http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=8391
  Debian 6:     http://libguestfs.org/download/binaries/debian-packages/
  Ubuntu 11.10: http://libguestfs.org/download/binaries/ubuntu1110-packages/

Release notes for libguestfs 1.14.0
-----------------------------------

These release notes only cover the differences from the previous
stable/dev branch split (1.12.0).  For detailed changelogs, please see
the git repository, or the ChangeLog file distributed in the tarball.

New features

  virt-alignment-scan is a new tool to check the alignment of
  partitions within virtual machines or disk images.

  virt-sparsify is a new tool to make virtual machine disk images
  sparse.

  virt-sysprep is a new tool to make cloning guests from a template
  simpler.

  erlang bindings.

  virt-cat:

   - virt-cat can now handle Windows paths and drive letters (RHBZ#693359).

  virt-filesystems:

   - the MBR partition type byte is displayed in --long output.

  virt-make-fs:

   - virt-make-fs now sets the MBR partition type byte correctly,
     improving compatibility with Windows (RHBZ#746295).

  virt-resize:

   - virt-resize can now work with guests using extended and logical
     partitions, in particular Ubuntu guests.

   - virt-resize can now align the first partition of Windows guests,
     improving performance.  The new virt-resize --align-first option
     controls this behaviour.

   - The virt-resize --machine-readable flag makes it possible to use
     virt-resize from other programs.

   - Partitions are now aligned to 128 sectors (usually 64K) by
     default.  This improves efficiency on high-end storage.  The new
     virt-resize --alignment option allows the alignment to be
     adjusted.

  virt-win-reg:

   - The syntax for deleting registry keys and values is documented
     in the man page (RHBZ#737944).

  guestfish:

   - New commands setenv, unsetenv, to set environment variables.

   - The input file and line number is printed in error messages.

   - guestfish progress bars are now a "mini-library" used by other
     tools too.

  guestmount:

   - the --live option (for access to live VMs) now works.

  library:

   - non-printing characters are escaped correctly in debug output.

   - GUESTFS_EVENT_ENTER is a new event type generated whenever a
     libguestfs function is called.

   - the library contains systemtap/DTrace probes.

   - the library can now be compiled without hivex (RHBZ#723474).

  inspection:

   - Improve detection of Windows disks.

   - Adds support for:
         ttylinux - a minimal Linux
         Mageia (thanks Michael Scherer)
         OpenSUSE and zypper (thanks Michael Scherer, Vincent Untz)
         Ubuntu logos (thanks Michael Scherer)
         NetBSD and pkgsrc (thanks Michael Scherer)

   - Handle some guest types that use /dev/root in /etc/fstab.

   - Fix handling of guests with > 26 disks (thanks Matthew Booth)

   - Add support for guests with HP Smart Array disks (thanks Matthew Booth)

  febootstrap:

   - FEBOOTSTRAP_KERNEL, FEBOOTSTRAP_MODULES environment variables can
     be set in order to choose which kernel to use for the appliance.

  misc:

   - ArchLinux support now working with Linux 3.0 (thanks Erik Nolte)

   - libvirt disks marked <readonly/> are now added readonly when
     using the virt-tools '-d' option.

Security

  (no security problems were found or fixed in this release)

New APIs

  compress-out, compress-device-out, copy-device-to-device,
  copy-device-to-file, copy-file-to-device, copy-file-to-file,
  get-smp, part-to-partnum, set-smp.

  The mount API no longer implicitly adds -o sync,noatime options.

  add-domain has a new 'readonlydisk' optional parameter to control
  how <readonly/> disks are handled.

Internals

 - Coverity was run on the source and more bugs were identified and
   fixed.

 - PCRE library is now required to build libguestfs.

 - APIC is now the default for the appliance.  You can also enable
   SMP support in the appliance.

 - OCaml bindings now correctly acquire GC lock during callbacks.

 - Out of tree builds should now work correctly (thanks Hilko Bengen).

 - ./configure --with-extra="..." can be used by packagers to set
   the extra version string.

 - zero, zero-device APIs: if the blocks already contain zeroes,
   don't write zeroes, so that we don't unnecessarily make the
   underlying storage non-sparse.

 - is-zero, is-zero-device APIs: optimize these so zero detection is
   faster.

Bugs fixed

 - 748266 libguestfs should detect versions of qemu which require -machine pc option
 - 747290 libguestfs ignores <readonly/> in libvirt XML
 - 747287 Misleading error message when permission denied opening a disk image
 - 746295 virt-make-fs doesn't set partition ID
 - 744795 guestmount --live is not usable
 - 737944 virt-win-reg hyphen (delete key) syntax may be wrong, and is not documented
 - 733297 ruby event handlers fail with "exception in callback: wrong argument type Proc (expected Data)"
 - 731744 libguestfs should escape special/non-printing characters in debug output
 - 729887 appliance crashes running aug_init with flags=4
 - 729075 libguestfs confuses Hp_recovery partition with Windows root filesystem
 - 727178 error: luks_open: cryptsetup: error while loading shared libraries: libfipscheck.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
 - 726739 libguestfs: error: aug_get: no matching node, trying to find hostname
 - 723474 If hivex and/or pcre not installed, libguestfs fails to compile
 - 693359 virt-cat and virt-edit don't handle case sensitive NTFS paths properly
 - 678231 virt-inspector reports unknown filesystem UUID
 - 671082 libguestfs does not work with kernel-rt
 - 666578 libguestfs: unknown filesystem label SWAP-sda2
 - 642821 virt-resize falls over on a disk image with a logical swap partition





-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines.  Tiny program with many
powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top