Re: [Qemu-devel] RFC: Proposal to add QEMU "Guest Environment Variables"

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

On Tue, Feb 03, 2015 at 02:09:22PM -0500, Gabriel L. Somlo wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm interested in adding a way for a host to pass environment variables
> into a qemu guest VM -- analogous to setting environment variables for
> a process to access via getenv() and friends.
> 
> The QEMU Guest Agent (QGA) does not appear to quite fit the bill, at
> least not in its current form: The agent must have been successfully
> started on the guest before the host would have to connect to it (in
> a separate act from just starting the guest in the first place), and
> get it to execute any hypothetical commands to configure or otherwise
> influence the guest.

> So, my question for the QEMU dev team:
> 
> 1. Would you consider this feature a useful addition to QEMU ?
>    I.e., would this be acceptable (of interest) to the upstream project?
> 
> 2. Is anything similar already being worked on (so I could either join
>    that effort, or back off, as the case may be) ? :)

IMHO this is already a solved problem via the cloud-init project which
is the widely used standard for injecting information into guest OS
at boot time. Any OS distro shipping cloud images is already going to
have cloud-init provided.

Regards,
Daniel
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