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

[Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.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.

Good libraries provide strong ABI compatibility.

Something like glib clearly documents what version of the library 
functions are available in, if you still to responsibly common 
functions, ABI compatibility should be much of an issue.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

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