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

[Robert Nelson]

Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 15, 2007 at 11:49:17AM -0800, Robert Nelson wrote:
>   
>> Hugh O. Brock wrote:
>>     
>>> On Wed, Nov 14, 2007 at 11:50:47PM -0800, Robert Nelson wrote:
>>>  
>>>       
>>>> I've been trying to add support for additional para-virtual operating 
>>>> systems (OpenSolaris and Debian) to virt-manager.  There is no problem 
>>>> getting the initial kernel and ramdisk, however there is no way to 
>>>> specify the target disk node based on the OS or distro.  Also some OS's 
>>>> don't support the virtual frame buffer driver but there is no way to 
>>>> prevent the XML for it being created.
>>>>
>>>> I can't see how this could be done without doing some major 
>>>> restructuring of the code and creating a new class to encapsulate all 
>>>> the target specific information.  Is there any plan on doing something 
>>>> like this?  If someone were to do it, are the changes likely to be 
>>>> incorporated?
>>>>    
>>>>         
>>> Hello Robert, thanks for your interest.
>>>
>>> I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "specify the target disk
>>> node based on the OS or distro"? 
>>>
>>>  
>>>       
>> Virt-Manager names the target disknodes xvda, xvdb, etc.   OpenSolaris 
>> requires 0, 1, 2, etc.
>>
>>     
>>> I would have no problem with adding a checkbox to virt-manager that
>>> would have the effect of passing the --nographics flag to virtinst if
>>> you can determine a good place to do it. I don't think we want to
>>> spend a whole ton of time creating a new class to take different PV
>>> guest OSes into account, though. Having said that, have you looked at
>>> the *Installer class family in virtinst? Is there a way we could
>>> extend that to do what you need?
>>>
>>>  
>>>       
>> I'll take another look at the Installer class and see if it can be done 
>> there.
>>     
>
> In the virtinst/FullVirtGuest.py  class, there is already a bunch of 
> OS specific metadata, eg what of mouse to use, apic/acpi/pae settings,
> whether the installer is multi-stage reboots (eg Windows). I'd recommend
> moving this metadata into virtinst/DistroManager and have a bunch of
> methods in that module for querying distro specific metadata, from the
> Installer class.
>
> Dan.
>   
And so we come full circle :-)  If you combine that with the OS specific 
derived classes of ImageStore you end up with something similar to what 
I originally proposed.

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