[libvirt] virt-install and custom distros
Cole Robinson
crobinso at redhat.com
Fri Aug 15 20:29:04 UTC 2008
Kay Williams wrote:
> We have an application that builds custom distributions based on RHEL, CentOS or
> Fedora. We would like to install these over the network using virt-install, but
> we've run into an issue with the distro check logic. Specifically, virt-install
> fails unless it finds a string "Red Hat Enterprise Linux", "Fedora" or "CentOS"
> within the family field of the .treeinfo file.
>
> Our application currently sets the family field to the user-provided distro name
> (see below). We have avoided using the base distro name given trademark concerns.
>
> [general]
> family = <user provided value>
> variant = <user provided value>
>
> We can get virt-install to pass the distro check by setting the family name to
> one of the accepted values, e.g.
>
> [general]
> family = Fedora
> variant = [user provided distro name]
>
> Is this the expected/desired use for the family and variant fields? Or is there
> another approach we should consider?
>
> Thanks,
> Kay
(cc-ing et-mgmt-tools, since that is the list for virt-install/
virt-manager)
We shouldn't be failing if the family/variant is unknown: it's really
just a convenience check. We can just assume it's an unknown distro
and continue on, checking for [images-xen] and so on.. The code may
need to be reworked a bit to accomodate this.
Although we don't do it at the moment, I could see us in the future
using this family/variant value to check our internal db on whether
to set up virtio and other specific settings. So using custom values
here may not allow virt-install to choose an optimal config, but we
should still try and let the install proceed.
- Cole
More information about the libvir-list
mailing list