Re: [Qemu-devel] RFC: Qemu Guest Tools ISO

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 12:08:26PM +0100, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 10:29 AM, Alon Levy <alevy@redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 01:55:25PM -0500, Michael Roth wrote:
> >> Goal:
> >>
> >> Provide a mechanism, similar to vmware and virtualbox guest tools
> >> ISOs, that allows us to easily distribute guest tools (and
> >> potentially drivers) for linux and windows guests.
> >
> > What would be the advantage for linux guests, with their package managers already
> > handling this task? I see how it would make testing easier with various linux
> > distributions, but for management I wonder if it won't be easier to use the
> > package management system to update the guests same as the hosts.
> 
> If the guest tools come from the host QEMU we don't need complicated
> compatibility testing and fallbacks.  Guest and host will be in sync
> and support the same features.
> 
> I'm not sure how we can update guest tools when the QEMU on the host
> is updated though.

While an ISO is a good option for the initial deployment, since it can
be used to provide both the virtio drivers + agents together, once you
have the virtio stuff installed in the guest, it might be worth exposing
updated tools via a 9p filesystem mount. For Linux guest the 9p fs
exposed could include a YUM repo (or equiv) which the guest update tool
would automatically see and pull updates from, since 9pfs is "live"
unlike an ISO.

Regards,
Daniel
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