On Monday, February 6, 2012 at 8:57 AM, Cole Robinson wrote:
On 02/06/2012 08:12 AM, Michael DeHaan wrote:Hi again Cole!Hmm … yes, I remember this discussion from years ago :)First comments are that this is both a decent new approach (using the CLIversus XML), and I'm also very concerned that you didn't test it yet, and thatthere may be several subtle regressions we wouldn't pick up until it shipped,because of workarounds around things libvirt didn't (used to) do.If your target is latest RHEL5, I'm pretty confident that most of thevirtinst/libvirt workarounds are now obsolete. All things considered, RHEL5.7has pretty modern libvirt and virtinst.Not having a lot of time this AM to review…just a few quick questions.We need to make sure all the disk and network options continue to work, whichwere implemented when libvirt didn't provide those capabilities. Does itsupport LVM and multiple network interfaces, etc in the exact same way (endresult wise)?None of the disk or network handling here relies on libvirt's storage/networkmanagement functionality, it should continue to work as before, modulo bugs.Similarly, I need to know if any options are used are available in newerdistributions but not older, as Cobbler needing to work in say, EL 5, isvitally important. Typically this has happened in the past, where libvirt wasnot running at equal versions on different distros.If your target is latest RHEL5, there are 2 problems.- RHEL5 virt-install doesn't have the --boot option. This is used to installxen PV guests. We could work around this by enabling install_location supportfor PV, which xen + virt-install have supported in RHEL5 forever. But not surehow that meshes with existing deployments getting a cobbler upgrade.
- RHEL5 virt-install doesn't had --disk driver_type= for qemu_driver_typecobbler option. Not as big of a deal, users just can't specify that value onRHEL5.
But in that vein, currently all koan image/qemu/xen guest creation is brokenon any RHEL5 since October, due to unconditional use of guest.set_autostartAPI which isn't in RHEL5.
As for image create, totally, it was added at the request of the oVirt team inancient days -- there's no need for it anymore. Please test it live and getback to me? I don't think it's fair to throw it over the wall and ask thecommunity folks to test/fix it and this shouldn'tbe too hard to do. When you get done, we can ask a few others to try it outand exercise the corners further.I'll test on f16 xen + kvm. But TBH I'm not that motivated to blow away amachine to install RHEL5 and test the variety of combinations there (and Ican't use a VM since this needs testing for fullvirt)
I could reformat the patch to preserve the old code and only use the new codeif koan can't import virtinst. However from a long term maintenance point ofview, that would be making the already bad koan situation (more or less samevirtinst implementation copied across 2.5 files with varying assortment offixes) even worse, since it would add yet another same-but-not-quiteimplementation of libvirt guest creation that could miss fixes, etc. Butcertainly it would greatly minimize risk for old hosts (but then again if oldhosts really wanted to minimize risk would they be updating? :) /me trolls )
So if that works for you I'd be happy to adjust the patch.Further discussion probably belongs on cobbler-devel, and when we get done youcan send me a github pull request to github.com/cobblerWhoops, I was doing patches against fedorahosted cobbler.git. Someone shouldpush a commit there marking that repo as dead...
And sorry about cobbler vs. cobbler-devel, I'll subscribe.
Thanks,Cole