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guestfs-release-notes - libguestfs Release Notes

RELEASE NOTES FOR LIBGUESTFS 1.50

These are the release notes for libguestfs stable release 1.50. This describes the major changes since 1.48.

Libguestfs 1.50.0 was released on 7 February 2023.

Language bindings
Fix the PHP bindings for PHP8 (Geoff Amey).

Fix various deprecation warnings in the GObject bindings.

We no longer use the deprecated Python distutils library (thanks Miro Hrončok).

Inspection
When listing the packages in RPM-based guests, the inspection API no longer checks package signatures. This is because the newer librpm used by libguestfs does not understand signatures stored in older guests, such as SHA1 used by RHEL 6 (thanks Panu Matilainen).

"guestfs_inspect_get_hostname" in guestfs(3) can now handle /etc/hostname files containing comments (thanks Dawid Zamirski).

"guestfs_file_architecture" in guestfs(3) can now parse files using zstd compression.

"guestfs_inspect_get_osinfo" in guestfs(3) now returns the correct osinfo field for Windows 11. However because of decisions made by Microsoft, these guests still return product name and other strings identifying as Windows 10 (thanks Yaakov Selkowitz, Yongkui Guo).

API
New APIs

"guestfs_device_name" in guestfs(3) is a new API to read the device name associated with a drive, for example calling this with 0 will return "/dev/sda".

"guestfs_clevis_luks_unlock" in guestfs(3) is a new API for unlocking disks using the Clevis/Tang network-based full disk encryption scheme. Furthermore implement this in guestfish and guestmount (Laszlo Ersek).

"guestfs_inspect_get_build_id" in guestfs(3) is a new API for reading the build ID from some Linux and Windows guests. It is not widely used on Linux, but for Windows it is vital for identifying Windows 11.

Other API changes

In the "guestfs_add_drive" in guestfs(3) API, the "name" and "iface" fields are not used. "name" has not been used since around 2017, but the documentation has only just been updated to reflect this. "iface" was never allowed for the libvirt backend and didn’t work reliably with the direct backend (Laszlo Ersek).

"guestfs_readdir" in guestfs(3) is no longer limited to the maximum message size but can read a directory of any size (Laszlo Ersek).

Build changes
Note that the Augeas bindings for libguestfs are no longer bundled with libguestfs and must be built separately. See: https://people.redhat.com/~rjones/augeas/ For RHEL 7+ rebuilding the Fedora Rawhide package will work.

Note that libguestfs now requires minimum OCaml 4.04. It will not compile on RHEL 6.

Note that zstd is now a required dependency.

OCaml gettext is no longer a dependency of libguestfs. (Plain gettext is still optionally used to translate C source files.)

Add support for OCaml 4.14.

Fix build for missing stdlib functions in OCaml 4.04.

Fix "./configure --disable-ocaml". OCaml is still required to build libguestfs, but this now correctly disables the OCaml bindings of the API.

Add support for building on Artix, Rocky and Virtuozzo (Halil Tezcan KARABULUT, Neil Hanlon, Andrey Drobyshev). In addition when working out the local distro we now look at $ID_LIKE in /etc/os-release before $ID which helps on Arch (thanks S D Rausty).

Add preliminary support for compiling libguestfs on macOS.

Fix website description of cloning the libguestfs repository (Kashyap Chamarthy).

We no longer use glibc custom printf.

We no longer use "LD_PRELOAD=libSegFault.so" in the appliance. This feature was removed in glibc 2.35.

We no longer use dtrace / systemtap probes.

Internals
Fix regression tests to use correct paths (Nikolay Shirokovskiy).

Various improvements to qcow2 appliance handling (Andrey Drobyshev).

Disable 5-level page tables in qemu. This avoids a bug in older versions of qemu.

Disable the LVM2 devicesfile in the appliance since it interferes with cloned LVs that have the same UUID (Laszlo Ersek).

Don’t use "-cpu max" on RISC-V as it is not yet supported by qemu’s TCG emulation of that architecture. This will be reenabled when qemu gets support.

Avoid a rare hang that would happen when launching the appliance. This turned out to be caused by using the unsafe call setenv(3) between fork and exec (thanks Siddhesh Poyarekar).

When running the file command inside the appliance we now disable seccomp since it interferes with processing compressed files (thanks David Runge, Toolybird).

Bugs fixed
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/2108425

compile of libguestfs-1.48.4 fails with Error: static declaration of ’caml_alloc_initialized_string’ follows non-static declaration

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/2064182

SHA 1 signatures required to inspect packages in RHEL 6 guests

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/2033247

document encrypted RBD disk limitation

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/2012658

libguestfs fails to detect Windows 11 guest image

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1965941

lvm-set-filter failed in guestfish with the latest lvm2 package

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1844341

The duplicate block device is listed when iface is set to ’virtio’

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1809453

[RFE] Add support for LUKS encrypted disks with Clevis & Tang

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1794518

Rewrite libguestfs use of setfiles so that it doesn’t stop on ext4 immutable bits

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1674392

No return values from a directory listing when there are simply too many files in that directory (NULL value return)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1554735

RFE: customize --selinux-relabel should be the default, with --no-selinux-relabel used to opt out

SEE ALSO

guestfs-examples(1), guestfs-faq(1), guestfs-performance(1), guestfs-recipes(1), guestfs-testing(1), guestfs(3), guestfish(1), http://libguestfs.org/

AUTHORS

Adolfo Jayme Barrientos
Andrey Drobyshev
Emilio Herrera
Ettore Atalan
Geoff Amey
Hela Basa
Jan Kuparinen
Kashyap Chamarthy
Laszlo Ersek
Marcin Stanclik
Michał Smyk
Neil Hanlon
Nikolay Shirokovskiy
Pavel Borecki
Piotr Drąg
Richard W.M. Jones
Ricky Tigg
Temuri Doghonadze
Yuri Chornoivan

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) 2009-2023 Red Hat Inc.

LICENSE

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.

BUGS

To get a list of bugs against libguestfs, use this link: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?component=libguestfs&product=Virtualization+Tools

To report a new bug against libguestfs, use this link: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?component=libguestfs&product=Virtualization+Tools

When reporting a bug, please supply: