[virt-tools-list] Proposal: A place to store metadata about guests

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 02:22:00PM +0300, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 1:32 PM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com> wrote> >> >  - Store data about available installer ISOs, guests which are
> >> >   archived and not known to libvirt.

[...]

>   The metadata you mean? Yes, thats going to be in osinfo. I intend to
> write a minor that extracts just volume, system and publisher IDs and
> a boolean indicating if the ISO is bootable but all that doesn't need
> to use libosinfo (though there will be some minor duplication of
> code).

I think we're talking at crossed purposes about the feature I
mentioned above.

I mean that if I have a directory full of ISO files, then it should be
possible to make available some metadata about those files.  I'm
considering an ISO to be a special sort of guest that hasn't been
installed yet.  libvirt (nor libosinfo for that matter) doesn't
currently know anything about directories full of ISOs.  Nor about
guest templates.

In any case, ISOs aren't really the main point of my proposal.

I'm more interested in making the inspection data that we collect
about (actual, non-ISO) guests available to other consumers,
specifically to virt-manager.  Currently libvirt offers a
<description/> field to do this, but it's extremely limited in what it
can contain, it's liable to be wiped out by accident, and it doesn't
support multiple users.

It's a fairly frequent request to be able to extend the libvirt XML to
store arbitrary guest data, and one which AFAIK has been rejected
upstream each time.

Rich.

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