libguestfs and guestfish

Summary

Libguestfs is a library for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images.

guestfish is an interactive shell tool for editing virtual machine disk images (examples here).

Owner

Name: Richard Jones

Current status

Targeted release: Fedora 12
Last updated: 2009-07-01
Percentage of completion: 90%

Detailed Description

libguestfs is a library for accessing and modifying guest disk images. Amongst the things this is good for: making batch configuration changes to guests, viewing and editing files inside guests, getting disk used/free statistics (see also: virt-df), migrating between virtualization systems (see also: virt-p2v), performing partial backups, performing partial guest clones, cloning guests and changing registry/UUID/hostname info, and much else besides.

libguestfs uses Linux kernel and qemu code, and can access any type of guest filesystem that Linux and qemu can, including but not limited to: ext2/3/4, btrfs, FAT and NTFS, LVM, many different disk partition schemes, qcow, qcow2, vmdk.

Typical usage, to edit the password file in a virtual machine called 'F11' ('F11' is the libvirt name):

$ guestfish -i F11
><fs> vi /etc/passwd

Lots more examples here.

Benefit to Fedora

The previous methods for doing this in Fedora were cumbersome and error-prone, usually involving creating loopback mounts as root, using kpartx, reconfiguring LVM.

libguestfs gets rid of all that and makes it easy to access and edit disk images. You don't even need to be root to do it.

Scope

libguestfs package in Fedora.
List of bugs upstream and list of bugs in Fedora package.

Test Plan

(Test plan to be written)

User Experience

The main user experience is the command-line guestfish tool.

libguestfs also contains bindings for numerous programming languages which will be of interest to developers.

Dependencies

None.

Contingency Plan

None needed.

Documentation

(To be written)

Release Notes