[virt-tools-list] Tracking VM installations

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Jul 04, 2012 at 10:45:29PM +0300, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We have a requirement in Boxes for showing progress bars on VMs under
> installation:
> 
> https://github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/raw/master/boxes/boxes-install6.png
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679107
> 
> However, we are bit clueless on how that could be achieved. The only
> idea I have is to know the number of passes (reboots) and typical disk
> usage in each pass for "every" (we only do this for express installs
> so we don't need this for all) OS and estimate the progress based on
> that knowledge. If that idea is worth looking into, we'll need this
> information in libosinfo and hence me cross-posting this to
> virt-tools-list.
> 
> Other ideas welcome! Keep in mind that we don't need to be very
> accurate, just accurate enough to not annoy the user.

I don't see any general purpose way todo a progress feedback. The best
you can do is to show whether /something/ is happening (by looking at
disk & net I/O stats).  If you want actual progress feedback then you're
looking at modifying the guest OS init process / installer to send feedback
over a virtio-serial device directly, or indirectly via a guest agent.


Daniel
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