[et-mgmt-tools] Virt-Manager: Supporting additional para-virtual OS's

[David Lutterkort]

On Thu, 2007-11-15 at 14:20 -0500, Hugh O. Brock wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 15, 2007 at 07:14:29PM +0000, David Lutterkort wrote:
> > 
> > Another route (though one that takes more effort), is to base install on
> > virt-image metadata - the idea is that we would ship stock virt-image
> > files for installable OS's; those files would contain the salient bits
> > about an OS (such as APIC/ACPI, whether to enable a graphics console,
> > kernel cmdline for pv) virt-manager would have to modify those files a
> > little before passing them off to virt-image, mostly to put things like
> > the ISO location and path to the root disk in.
> > 
> 
> That seems like the right way to do it. We need an image-packager though, right?

Not necessarily .. I was thinking that virt-manager would edit the stock
image.xml to include user-provided information about where the install
ISO and the target disk file are. The image.xml we ship would be
complete except that it doesn't contain a <storage/> section, and that
the disk/target mapping is missing; those owuld be filled in by
virt-manager before kicking off the install. IOW, we'd use it mostly for
expressing arch, features, and whether to enable graphics.

There's a few problems still though: (1) virt-image doesn't let you
assign a MAC from XML and (2) IIRC it doesn't handle LVM volumes. Both
shouldn't be too hard to address. 

The main point is that the OS-specific install information should move
out of the code into some data files - and virt-image seems to be pretty
close in terms of what needs to be expressed.

David