Re: [libvirt] libvirt, FreeBSD portability inquiry

[Matthias Bolte <matthias bolte googlemail com>]

2011/5/12 Jason Helfman <jhelfman e-e com>:
> Hi,
>
> I am interested in porting libvirt to FreeBSD, and am curious if there may
> be anything that may not be possible at this point in respect to the libvirt
> source code to be aware of. Here is the log of the build of the software:
>
> I know it has been ported to MacOSX, and thought it could then be possible
> with FreeBSD.
>
> Thanks,
> Jason

libvirt should be compilable on FreeBSD. At least it was in this state
a while ago when I've fixed some compile errors. I just check it
again.

You'll need to explicitly run

./configure --without-network --without-polkit

because libvirt's virtual networking code is specific to Linux bridges
and libvirt doesn't polkit on FreeBSD yet.

You'll also need this patch on top of libvirt 0.9.1

https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2011-May/msg00831.html

Then it compiles for me. There are still several warnings about NULL
format strings and devname shadowing a global symbol.

Maybe Eric knows if this warning is critical:

util/sexpr.c: In function 'sexpr2string':
util/sexpr.c:250: warning: null format string [-Wformat]

virSexprError(VIR_ERR_SEXPR_SERIAL, NULL);

So aside from possible simple compile errors you'll need to port at
least the virtual networking to FreeBSD when you want to run QEMU
using libvirt on FreeBSD. If you just want to support the libvirt
client side to use libvirt to control a hypervisor running on a
non-FreeBSD host then you're already there.

Matthias