On 06/22/2011 09:55 PM, Michael Roth wrote:
Goal:
Provide a mechanism, similar to vmware and virtualbox guest tools
ISOs, that allows us to easily distribute guest tools (and potentially
drivers) for linux and windows guests.
Advantages (rough list to start the discussion, feel free to
add/comment):
- Simplify deployment of guest additions. ISO-installable additions
can be pulled from QEMU/KVM/virtio/etc upstream or external projects
as needed rather than worked into distros as independent packages.
Users do not need to worry about installing lists of packages for full
support. Pre-made ISOs can be pulled into QEMU/KVM in a manner similar
to BIOSs/option roms.
- Reduce complexity involved with needing to manage guests with
outdated/missing tools or drivers. No need to rely on distros to pull
drivers/features/bug fixes from upstream before relying on them; we
can assume these fixes/features are immediately available from an
upstream perspective, and distros can still maintain compatibility
within a distro-centric environment by shipping specific versions of
the guest tools ISO (hopefully the version committed to qemu.git at
time of rebase or newer)
- Simplify updates: Hypervisor can push guest tools updates by
building QMP/guest agent interfaces around an ISO.
- Extend support to older guests (and windows) where new repo packages
are not a realistic option.
- ?
Disadvantages:
- Need to test changes to tools against supported distros/platforms
rather than punting to / or leveraging distro maintainers. KVM
Autotest would likely be a big part of this.
- Potentially less integration from a distro-centric perspective.
Upstream mandates guest tools, distros need to keep up or rebase to
remain in sync. Can still elect to support specific versions of a
guest tools ISO, however.
- ?
Implementation:
I hope to follow-up in fairly short order with a basic prototype of
the tools/workflow to create/install a guest additions ISO. A rough
overview of the approach I'm currently pursuing:
- Use PyInstaller (built around pye2exe, linux/windows compatible,
with logic to pull in required shared libs and windows/tcl/cmd.exe
support as needed) to generate executables from python scripts.
- Each project exists as a free-form directory with source code, or
32/64 bit pre-compiled binaries, windows-based installers, etc. To add
to an ISO a symlink to this directory would be added along with a
python installer script which accepts arch/distro as arguments.
install/update/uninstall logic handled completely by this install script.
- Top-level installer will iterate through guest additions projects
and execute installers in turn. (some basic dependency support or
explicit ordered may be needed).
- Install scripts (top-level and per-project) will be run through a
set of scripts built around PyInstaller to generate a group of
executable installers for linux as well as for windows (installers can
be do-nothings for unsupported platforms, or simply call out to other
binaries if using, say, an MSI windows installer). Both will co-exist
on the same ISO, and share the top-level projects directory containing
the individual code/binaries for individual projects.
Thoughts?
The windows drivers are an issue. You do not want to compile them since
you need the hard-to-get Microsoft certification. Now that you have to
provide them in binary mode, the question is whether it makes sense to
treat the Windows agent differently.
Other than building the windows drivers, I don't see an issue.
Ronen.
