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

[Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>]

On 06/23/2011 05:54 PM, Michael Roth wrote:
> 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.

The kernel keeps breaking it and they keep fixing it.  They're solving a 
much more difficult problem though (an explicitly unstable API).

> We'd want to have a controlled environment that's used for building 
> the tools we add to the ISO though.

I'm not even sure that such a least-common-denominator exists.

-- 
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