[Libguestfs] Kernel panic with virt-builder etc.

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Nov 07, 2013 at 01:58:22PM +0100, Oliver Frommel wrote:
> Dammit, you are fast! I just tried to figure out what's missing from
> running "init" on the host and installing the missing packages, among
> them "mdadm" and others. Also I noticed that "appliance/packagelist"
> includes a lot of packages that aren't available on Ubuntu, but maybe
> that doesn't matter.

appliance/packagelist is normally processed by a tool called
'supermin' which ignores packages that don't exist.

> Anyway, I tried your solution but still get the kernel panic in the
> "make quickcheck" step.

Note that after making sure everything is up to date in the host,
you'll have to recompile the appliance:

  make -C appliance clean
  make -C appliance all


Anyway, a simpler alternative to all this is to download the ~70MB
precompiled appliance from
http://libguestfs.org/download/binaries/appliance/

Here's how to use that:

cd /tmp
wget http://libguestfs.org/download/binaries/appliance/appliance-1.24.0.tar.xz
xzcat appliance-1.24.0.tar.xz | tar xvf -

Set LIBGUESTFS_PATH to point to the appliance:

export LIBGUESTFS_PATH=/tmp/appliance

Recompile libguestfs without the appliance code:

./configure --disable-appliance --disable-daemon && make -j5

and you can run commands using the ./run script:

export VIRT_BUILDER_SOURCE=http://libguestfs.org/download/builder/index.asc
./run ./builder/virt-builder -l
./run ./builder/virt-builder debian-6
[etc]

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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