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

[Michael Roth <mdroth@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

On 06/23/2011 07:00 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:
> On 06/23/2011 02:08 PM, 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.
>>
>
> Even building the tools would be very hard. In general if you build
> against libc version y, you cannot expect your code to work against libc
> version y-1, unless you take special measures. With other libraries the
> "special measures" may not even be possible.

Nvidia/ATI driver installers might be a good (or bad) precedent, I 
believe they ship a generic blob....need to confirm. We'd want to have a 
controlled environment that's used for building the tools we add to the 
ISO though.

>
> (I'm assuming statically linking the binaries is out of the question)
>

Not totally, but the build environment would need to be carefully 
crafted, and for something like the guest agent which pulls in glib/curl 
I'm not sure how viable that is.