[virt-tools-list] [PATCH libosinfo] Handle distinction of OS vs kernel version correctly.

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 09:27:35AM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> No, I don't believe that is correct. This is conflating the Windows
> kernel version (6.1) with the windows OS version (7). I in fact *do*
> consider the Windows 2008 OS version to be 2008, but it has a kernel
> version of 6.1. It is not OS version 6.1. Some Windows releases don't
> have any sane version at all (Vista, ME, etc) in which case I'm just
> leaving the data blank, but there is still a kernel version number
> available for them.

I would have thought that if "Windows 7" was really version 7, there
would have been 6 preceding versions called Windows 1 through 6.  In
fact there were more like a dozen preceding versions according to
Wikipedia.  Anyhow, everyone refers to the version in the registry,
which for "Windows 7" is 6.1.

In libguestfs, we have a product name field which is used for the
marketing name, "Windows 7", "Windows Vista" etc, and is also what we
display to end users.

> > BTW you also need to distinguish between windows "Client" and "Server"
> > product variants (cf. guestfs_inspect_get_product_variant).
> > 
> > It would have been a good idea to use the same scheme as libguestfs
> > which already solved this problem thoroughly and has been
> > battle-tested in production with virt-v2v ...
> 
> I don't believe libguestfs is correct in its version number handling
> here either. It has also been treating the Windows kernel version
> as if it were an operating system version. ie both Windows 7 and
> Windows Server 2008 r2 are reporting version '6.1' - they are
> certainly not the same OS version.

libguestfs correctly distinguishes these by using the product variant
("Server" vs "Client").  They are essentially identical OSes with just
small tweaks -- they were even released on the same day!  virt-v2v
uses the product variant to make some minor adjustments between these
two variants.

Rich.

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