[virt-tools-list] [PATCH] Add a 'class' attribute to OS

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 05:27:15PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 09:06:13AM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
> > On 06/29/2011 09:00 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > > On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 05:55:11PM +0300, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
> > >> From: "Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)" <zeeshanak at gnome.org>
> > >>
> > >> This is the generic family this OS belongs to, for example Linux, Windows,
> > >> Solaris, UNIX etc.
> > 
> > >> @@ -35,6 +38,7 @@
> > >>      <short-id>openbsd4</short-id>
> > >>      <name>OpenBSD 4</name>
> > >>      <version>4.9</version>
> > >> +    <family>UNIX</family>
> > >>      <vendor>OpenBSD Project</vendor>
> > >>  
> > >>      <devices>
> > > 
> > > Perhaps we should let BSD have a family of 'BSD' ?
> > 
> > And if we do that, would we classify MacOS as BSD?
> > 
> > Also, is MirBSD in the list of known OS yet?  I have successfully
> > installed that BSD flavor in a VM in the past.
> 
> Eric's point above is a good one.  What is "Family"?  It sounds like
> it is the historical derivation of the OS, but that's not very useful
> except to Unix history geeks.

'Family' is basically a group of related distros.

So, eg, every Red Hat Enterprise Linux release is in family 'rhel'

Every Fedora release is family 'fedora', etc

It isn't really about UNIX history here. It is more a grouping of
a vendor's products.

> How about what *kernel* does this run - ie. Linux, Windows, FreeBSD,
> Darwin(?), ...  That would actually be a useful thing to know because
> it affects whether virtio drivers are available, whether we can run
> crash or virt-dmesg on it, and whether the hypervisor has been tested
> against it.

That's a useful piece of metadata. I would recommend we add an explicit
'kernel' element to track that independently of 'family'.

Regards,
Daniel
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