On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 07:24:40PM +0200, Barak Azulay wrote:
Hi,
One of the breakout sessions during the ovirt workshop [1] was about the guest tools, and focused mainly on the ovirt-guest-agent [2].
One of the issues discussed there, was the various existing guest agents out there, and the need to converge the efforts to a single agent that will serve all.
while 4 agents were mentioned (Matahari, vdagent, qemu-ga & ovirt-guest-agent) during that discussion, we narrowed it down to 2 candidates:
qemu-ga (aka virt-agent):
- Qemu specific - it was aimed for specific qemu needs (mainly quiesce guest
I/O)
- Communicates directly with qemu (not implemented yet)
- Supports ?
- So far linux only
- written in C
Ovirt-guest-agent:
- Has been around for a long time (~5 years) - considered stable
- Started as rhevm specific but evolved a lot since then
- Currently the only fully functional guest agent available for ovirt
- Written in python
- Some VDI related sub components are written in C & C++
- Supports a well defined list of message types / protocol [3]
- Supports the folowing guest OSs Linux: RHEL5, RHEL6 F15, F16(soon)
Does it have a seperate system level and user level part in Linux? It does in windows, right? This is a requirment for replacing vdagent+vdservice and the linux spice-agent, they both need to be active during login stage, and then launch a new session agent when the user is logged in. This is true for both linux and windows, although we have completely different code bases for them:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/spice/linux/vd_agent/ http://cgit.freedesktop.org/spice/win32/vd_agent/
linux is C, windows is C++ btw.
Windows: xp, 2k3 (32/64), w7 (32/64), 2k8 (32/64/R2)
The need to converge is obvious, and now that ovirt-guest-agent is opensourced under the ovirt stack, and since it already produces value for enterprise installations, and is cross platform, I offer to join hands around ovirt- guest-agent and formalize a single code base that will serve us all.
git @ git://gerrit.ovirt.org/ovirt-guest-agent
Thoughts ?
Thanks Barak Azulay
[1] http://www.ovirt.org/news-and-events/workshop [2] http://www.ovirt.org/wiki/File:Ovirt-guest-agent.odp [3] http://www.ovirt.org/wiki/Ovirt_guest_agent