On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 12:08:26PM +0100, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote: > On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 10:29 AM, Alon Levy <al...@redhat.com> wrote: > > On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 01:55:25PM -0500, 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. > > > > What would be the advantage for linux guests, with their package managers > > already > > handling this task? I see how it would make testing easier with various > > linux > > distributions, but for management I wonder if it won't be easier to use the > > package management system to update the guests same as the hosts. > > If the guest tools come from the host QEMU we don't need complicated > compatibility testing and fallbacks. Guest and host will be in sync > and support the same features. > > I'm not sure how we can update guest tools when the QEMU on the host > is updated though.
While an ISO is a good option for the initial deployment, since it can be used to provide both the virtio drivers + agents together, once you have the virtio stuff installed in the guest, it might be worth exposing updated tools via a 9p filesystem mount. For Linux guest the 9p fs exposed could include a YUM repo (or equiv) which the guest update tool would automatically see and pull updates from, since 9pfs is "live" unlike an ISO. Regards, Daniel -- |: http://berrange.com -o- http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: http://entangle-photo.org -o- http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|
