=encoding utf8 =head1 NAME guestfs-faq - libguestfs Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) =head1 ABOUT LIBGUESTFS =head2 What is libguestfs? libguestfs is a way to create, access and modify disk images. You can look inside disk images, modify the files they contain, create them from scratch, resize them, and much more. It's especially useful from scripts and programs and from the command line. libguestfs is a C library (hence "lib-"), and a set of tools built on this library, and bindings for many common programming languages. For more information about what libguestfs can do read the introduction on the home page (L). =head2 What are the virt tools? Virt tools (website: L) are a whole set of virtualization management tools aimed at system administrators. Some of them come from libguestfs, some from libvirt and many others from other open source projects. So virt tools is a superset of libguestfs. However libguestfs comes with many important tools. See L for a full list. =head2 Does libguestfs need { libvirt / KVM / Red Hat / Fedora }? No! libvirt is not a requirement for libguestfs. libguestfs works with any disk image, including ones created in VMware, KVM, qemu, VirtualBox, Xen, and many other hypervisors, and ones which you have created from scratch. S sponsors (ie. pays for) development of libguestfs and a huge number of other open source projects. But you can run libguestfs and the virt tools on many different Linux distros and Mac OS X. Some virt tools have been ported to Windows. =head2 How does libguestfs compare to other tools? =over 4 =item I Libguestfs takes a different approach from kpartx. kpartx needs root, and mounts filesystems on the host kernel (which can be insecure - see L). Libguestfs isolates your host kernel from guests, is more flexible, scriptable, supports LVM, doesn't require root, is isolated from other processes, and cleans up after itself. Libguestfs is more than just file access because you can use it to create images from scratch. =item I vdfuse is like kpartx but for VirtualBox images. See the kpartx comparison above. You can use libguestfs on the partition files exposed by vdfuse, although it's not necessary since libguestfs can access VirtualBox images directly. =item I nbd is like kpartx but for qcow2 images. See the kpartx comparison above. You can use libguestfs and qemu-nbd together for access to block devices over the network. =item I Mounting guest filesystems in the host is insecure and should be avoided completely for untrusted guests. Use libguestfs to provide a layer of protection against filesystem exploits. See also L. =item I Libguestfs supports LVM. Libguestfs uses parted and provides most parted features through the libguestfs API. =back =head1 GETTING HELP AND REPORTING BUGS =head2 How do I know what version I'm using? The simplest method is: guestfish --version Libguestfs development happens along an unstable branch and we periodically create a stable branch which we backport stable patches to. To find out more, read L. =head2 How can I get help? =head2 What mailing lists or chat rooms are available? If you are a S customer using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, please contact S: L There is a mailing list, mainly for development, but users are also welcome to ask questions about libguestfs and the virt tools: L You can also talk to us on IRC channel C<#libguestfs> on FreeNode. We're not always around, so please stay in the channel after asking your question and someone will get back to you. For other virt tools (not ones supplied with libguestfs) there is a general virt tools mailing list: L =head2 How do I report bugs? Please use the following link to enter a bug in Bugzilla: L Include as much detail as you can and a way to reproduce the problem. Include the full output of L. =head1 COMMON PROBLEMS See also L for some "gotchas" with using the libguestfs API. =head2 "child process died unexpectedly" This error indicates that qemu failed or the host kernel could not boot. To get further information about the failure, you have to run: libguestfs-test-tool If, after using this, you still don't understand the failure, contact us (see previous section). =head2 Non-ASCII characters don't appear on VFAT filesystems. Typical symptoms of this problem: =over 4 =item * You get an error when you create a file where the filename contains non-ASCII characters, particularly non 8-bit characters from Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, etc). The filesystem is VFAT. =item * When you list a directory from a VFAT filesystem, filenames appear as question marks. =back This is a design flaw of the GNU/Linux system. VFAT stores long filenames as UTF-16 characters. When opening or returning filenames, the Linux kernel has to translate these to some form of 8 bit string. UTF-8 would be the obvious choice, except for Linux users who persist in using non-UTF-8 locales (the user's locale is not known to the kernel because it's a function of libc). Therefore you have to tell the kernel what translation you want done when you mount the filesystem. The two methods are the C parameter (which is not relevant to libguestfs) and the C flag. So to use a VFAT filesystem you must add the C flag when mounting. From guestfish, use: > mount-options utf8 /dev/sda1 / or on the guestfish command line: guestfish [...] -m /dev/sda1:/:utf8 or from the API: guestfs_mount_options (g, "utf8", "/dev/sda1", "/"); The kernel will then translate filenames to and from UTF-8 strings. We considered adding this mount option transparently, but unfortunately there are several problems with doing that: =over 4 =item * On some Linux systems, the C mount option doesn't work. We don't precisely understand what systems or why, but this was reliably reported by one user. =item * It would prevent you from using the C parameter because it is incompatible with C. It is probably not a good idea to use this parameter, but we don't want to prevent it. =back =head2 Non-ASCII characters appear as underscore (_) on ISO9660 filesystems. The filesystem was not prepared correctly with mkisofs or genisoimage. Make sure the filesystem was created using Joliet and/or Rock Ridge extensions. libguestfs does not require any special mount options to handle the filesystem. =head1 DOWNLOADING, INSTALLING, COMPILING LIBGUESTFS =begin html =end html =head2 Where can I get the latest binaries for ...? =over 4 =item Fedora E 11 Use: yum install '*guestf*' For the latest builds, see: L =item Red Hat Enterprise Linux =over 4 =item RHEL 5 Use the package from EPEL 5: L =item RHEL 6.2-6.3 It is part of the default install. On RHEL 6 (only) you have to install C to get Windows guest support. =item RHEL 6.4 A preview repository is available. See the announcement here: L =item RHEL 7 It will be part of the default install, and based on libguestfs 1.20. As with RHEL 6 you will need to install C separately to get Windows guest support. =back =item Debian and Ubuntu =over 4 =item Debian Squeeze (6) Use Hilko Bengen's backport repository: L =item Debian Wheezy and later (7+) Official Debian packages are available: L (thanks Hilko Bengen). =item Ubuntu We don't have a full time Ubuntu maintainer, and the packages supplied by Canonical (which are outside our control) are sometimes broken. Canonical decided to change the permissions on the kernel so that it's not readable except by root. This is completely stupid, but they won't change it (L). So every user should do this: sudo chmod 0644 /boot/vmlinuz* =item Ubuntu 10.04 See: L =item Ubuntu 12.04 libguestfs in this version of Ubuntu works, but you need to update febootstrap and seabios to the latest versions. You need febootstrap E 3.14-2 from: L After installing or updating febootstrap, rebuild the appliance: sudo update-guestfs-appliance You need seabios E 0.6.2-0ubuntu2.1 or E 0.6.2-0ubuntu3 from: L or L Also you need to do (see above): sudo chmod 0644 /boot/vmlinuz* =back =item Gentoo Libguestfs was added to Gentoo in 2012-07. Do: emerge libguestfs =item Other Linux distro Compile from source (next section). =item Other non-Linux distro You'll have to compile from source, and port it. =back =head2 How can I compile and install libguestfs from source? If your Linux distro has a working port of febootstrap (that is, Fedora, S 6.3>, Debian, Ubuntu and ArchLinux) then you should just be able to compile from source in the usual way. Download the latest tarball from L, unpack it, and start by reading the README file. If you I have febootstrap, you will need to use the "fixed appliance method". See: L Patches to port febootstrap to more Linux distros are welcome. =head2 Why do I get an error when I try to rebuild from the source RPMs supplied by Red Hat / Fedora? Because of the complexity of building the libguestfs appliance, the source RPMs provided cannot be rebuilt directly using C or C. If you use Koji (which is open source software and may be installed locally), then the SRPMs can be rebuilt in Koji. L If you don't have or want to use Koji, then you have to give libguestfs access to the network so it can download the RPMs for building the appliance. You also need to set an RPM macro to tell libguestfs to use the network. Put the following line into a file called C<$HOME/.rpmmacros>: %libguestfs_buildnet 1 If you are using mock, do: mock -D '%libguestfs_buildnet 1' [etc] =head2 How can I add support for sVirt? Note: We are planning to make this configuration the default in S. If you find any problems, please let us know or file a bug. L provides a hardened appliance using SELinux, making it very hard for a rogue disk image to "escape" from the confinement of libguestfs and damage the host (it's fair to say that even in standard libguestfs this would be hard, but sVirt provides an extra layer of protection for the host and more importantly protects virtual machines on the same host from each other). Currently to enable sVirt you will need the very latest libvirt (from git), libguestfs and SELinux policies. If you are not running S, you will need to make changes to your SELinux policy - contact us on the mailing list. Once you have the requirements, do: ./configure --with-default-attach-method=libvirt make Enable SELinux, and sVirt should be used automatically. All, or almost all, features of libguestfs should work under sVirt. There is one known shortcoming: L will not use libvirt (hence sVirt), but falls back to direct launch of qemu. So you won't currently get the benefit of sVirt protection when using virt-rescue. In theory sVirt should support AppArmor, but we have not tried it. It will almost certainly require patching libvirt and writing an AppArmor policy. =head2 Libguestfs has a really long list of dependencies! That's because it does a lot of things. =head2 How can I speed up libguestfs builds? By far the most important thing you can do is to install and properly configure Squid. Note that the default configuration that ships with Squid is rubbish, so configuring it is not optional. A very good place to start with Squid configuration is here: L Make sure Squid is running, and that the environment variables C<$http_proxy> and C<$ftp_proxy> are pointing to it. With Squid running and correctly configured, appliance builds should be reduced to a few minutes. =head1 SPEED, DISK SPACE USED BY LIBGUESTFS Note: Most of the information in this section has moved: L. =head2 Upload or write seem very slow. In libguestfs E 1.13.16, the mount command (L) enabled option C<-o sync> implicitly. This causes very poor write performance, and was one of the main gotchas for new libguestfs users. For libguestfs E 1.13.16, replace mount with C, leaving the first parameter as an empty string. You can also do this with more recent versions of libguestfs, but if you know that you are using libguestfs ≥ 1.13.16 then it's safe to use plain mount. If the underlying disk is not fully allocated (eg. sparse raw or qcow2) then writes can be slow because the host operating system has to do costly disk allocations while you are writing. The solution is to use a fully allocated format instead, ie. non-sparse raw, or qcow2 with the C option. =head2 Libguestfs uses too much disk space! libguestfs caches a large-ish appliance in: /var/tmp/.guestfs- If the environment variable C is defined, then C<$TMPDIR/.guestfs-EUIDE> is used instead. It is safe to delete this directory when you are not using libguestfs. =head2 virt-sparsify seems to make the image grow to the full size of the virtual disk If the input to L is raw, then the output will be raw sparse. Make sure you are measuring the output with a tool which understands sparseness such as C. It can make a huge difference: $ ls -lh test1.img -rw-rw-r--. 1 rjones rjones 100M Aug 8 08:08 test1.img $ du -sh test1.img 3.6M test1.img (Compare the apparent size B<100M> vs the actual size B<3.6M>) If all this confuses you, use a non-sparse output by specifying the I<--convert> option, eg: virt-sparsify --convert qcow2 disk.raw disk.qcow2 =head1 USING LIBGUESTFS IN YOUR OWN PROGRAMS =head2 The API has hundreds of methods, where do I start? We recommend you start by reading the API overview: L. Although the API overview covers the C API, it is still worth reading even if you are going to use another programming language, because the API is the same, just with simple logical changes to the names of the calls: C guestfs_ln_sf (g, target, linkname); Python g.ln_sf (target, linkname); OCaml g#ln_sf target linkname; Perl $g->ln_sf (target, linkname); Shell (guestfish) ln-sf target linkname PHP guestfs_ln_sf ($g, $target, $linkname); Once you're familiar with the API overview, you should look at this list of starting points for other language bindings: L. =begin html =end html =head2 Can I use libguestfs in my proprietary / closed source / commercial program? In general, yes. However this is not legal advice - read the license that comes with libguestfs, and if you have specific questions contact a lawyer. In the source tree the license is in the file C (LGPLv2+ for the library and bindings) and C (GPLv2+ for the standalone programs). =head1 DEBUGGING LIBGUESTFS =head2 How do I debug when using any libguestfs program or tool (eg. virt-v2v or virt-df)? There are two C environment variables you can set in order to get more information from libguestfs. =over 4 =item C Set this to 1 and libguestfs will print out each command / API call in a format which is similar to guestfish commands. =item C Set this to 1 in order to enable massive amounts of debug messages. If you think there is some problem inside the libguestfs appliance, then you should use this option. =back To set these from the shell, do this before running the program: export LIBGUESTFS_TRACE=1 export LIBGUESTFS_DEBUG=1 For csh/tcsh the equivalent commands would be: setenv LIBGUESTFS_TRACE 1 setenv LIBGUESTFS_DEBUG 1 For further information, see: L. =head2 How do I debug when using guestfish? You can use the same environment variables above. Alternatively use the guestfish options -x (to trace commands) or -v (to get the full debug output), or both. For further information, see: L. =head2 How do I debug when using the API? Call L to enable command traces, and/or L to enable debug messages. For best results, call these functions as early as possible, just after creating the guestfs handle if you can, and definitely before calling launch. =head2 How do I capture debug output and put it into my logging system? Use the event API. For examples, see: L. =head2 Digging deeper into the appliance boot process. Enable debugging and then read this documentation on the appliance boot process: L. =head2 libguestfs hangs or fails during run/launch. Enable debugging and look at the full output. If you cannot work out what is going on, file a bug report, including the I output of L. =head1 DESIGN/INTERNALS OF LIBGUESTFS =head2 Why don't you do everything through the FUSE / filesystem interface? We offer a command called L which lets you mount guest filesystems on the host. This is implemented as a FUSE module. Why don't we just implement the whole of libguestfs using this mechanism, instead of having the large and rather complicated API? The reasons are twofold. Firstly, libguestfs offers API calls for doing things like creating and deleting partitions and logical volumes, which don't fit into a filesystem model very easily. Or rather, you could fit them in: for example, creating a partition could be mapped to C but then you'd have to specify some method to choose the size of the partition (maybe C /fs/hda1/.size>), and the partition type, start and end sectors etc., but once you've done that the filesystem-based API starts to look more complicated than the call-based API we currently have. The second reason is for efficiency. FUSE itself is reasonably efficient, but it does make lots of small, independent calls into the FUSE module. In guestmount these have to be translated into messages to the libguestfs appliance which has a big overhead (in time and round trips). For example, reading a file in 64 KB chunks is inefficient because each chunk would turn into a single round trip. In the libguestfs API it is much more efficient to download an entire file or directory through one of the streaming calls like C or C. =head2 Why don't you do everything through GVFS? The problems are similar to the problems with FUSE. GVFS is a better abstraction than POSIX/FUSE. There is an FTP backend for GVFS, which is encouraging because FTP is conceptually similar to the libguestfs API. However the GVFS FTP backend makes multiple simultaneous connections in order to keep interactivity, which we can't easily do with libguestfs. =begin html =end html =head2 Can I use C as a way to backup my virtual machines? Usually this is not a good idea. The question is answered in more detail in this mailing list posting: L =head2 Why can I write to the disk, even though I added it read-only? =head2 Why does C<--ro> appear to have no effect? When you add a disk read-only, libguestfs places a writable overlay on top of the underlying disk. Writes go into this overlay, and are discarded when the handle is closed (or C etc. exits). There are two reasons for doing it this way: Firstly read-only disks aren't possible in many cases (eg. IDE simply doesn't support them, so you couldn't have an IDE-emulated read-only disk, although this is not common in real libguestfs installations). Secondly and more importantly, even if read-only disks were possible, you wouldn't want them. Mounting any filesystem that has a journal, even C, causes writes to the filesystem because the journal has to be replayed and metadata updated. If the disk was truly read-only, you wouldn't be able to mount a dirty filesystem. To make it usable, we create the overlay as a place to temporarily store these writes, and then we discard it afterwards. This ensures that the underlying disk is always untouched. Note also that there is a regression test for this when building libguestfs (in C). This is one reason why it's important for packagers to run the test suite. =head2 Does C<--ro> make all disks read-only? I The C<--ro> option only affects disks added on the command line, ie. using C<-a> and C<-d> options. In guestfish, if you use the C command, then disk is added read-write (unless you specify the C flag explicitly with the command). =head2 What's the difference between guestfish and virt-rescue? A lot of people are confused by the two superficially similar tools we provide: $ guestfish --ro -a guest.img > run > fsck /dev/sda1 $ virt-rescue --ro guest.img > /sbin/fsck /dev/sda1 And the related question which then arises is why you can't type in full shell commands with all the --options in guestfish (but you can in L). L is a program providing structured access to the L API. It happens to be a nice interactive shell too, but its primary purpose is structured access from shell scripts. Think of it more like a language binding, like Python and other bindings, but for shell. The key differentiating factor of guestfish (and the libguestfs API in general) is the ability to automate changes. L is a free-for-all freeform way to boot the libguestfs appliance and make arbitrary changes to your VM. It's not structured, you can't automate it, but for making quick ad-hoc fixes to your guests, it can be quite useful. But, libguestfs also has a "backdoor" into the appliance allowing you to send arbitrary shell commands. It's not as flexible as virt-rescue, because you can't interact with the shell commands, but here it is anyway: > debug sh "cmd arg1 arg2 ..." Note that you should B rely on this. It could be removed or changed in future. If your program needs some operation, please add it to the libguestfs API instead. =head2 What's the deal with C? =head2 Why does virt-cat only work on a real VM image, but virt-df works on any disk image? =head2 What does "no root device found in this operating system image" mean? These questions are all related at a fundamental level which may not be immediately obvious. At the L API level, a "disk image" is just a pile of partitions and filesystems. In contrast, when the virtual machine boots, it mounts those filesystems into a consistent hierarchy such as: / (/dev/sda2) | +-- /boot (/dev/sda1) | +-- /home (/dev/vg_external/Homes) | +-- /usr (/dev/vg_os/lv_usr) | +-- /var (/dev/vg_os/lv_var) (or drive letters on Windows). The API first of all sees the disk image at the "pile of filesystems" level. But it also has a way to inspect the disk image to see if it contains an operating system, and how the disks are mounted when the operating system boots: L. Users expect some tools (like L) to work with VM paths: virt-cat fedora.img /var/log/messages How does virt-cat know that C is a separate partition? The trick is that virt-cat performs inspection on the disk image, and uses that to translate the path correctly. Some tools (including L, L, L) use inspection to map VM paths. Other tools, such as L and L operate entirely at the raw "big pile of filesystems" level of the libguestfs API, and don't use inspection. L is in an interesting middle ground. If you use the I<-a> and I<-m> command line options, then you have to tell guestfish exactly how to add disk images and where to mount partitions. This is the raw API level. If you use the I<-i> option, libguestfs performs inspection and mounts the filesystems for you. The error C is related to this. It means inspection was unable to locate an operating system within the disk image you gave it. You might see this from programs like virt-cat if you try to run them on something which is just a disk image, not a virtual machine disk image. =head2 What do these C and C functions do? There are some functions which are used for debugging and internal purposes which are I part of the stable API. The C (or C) functions, primarily L and a handful of others, are used for debugging libguestfs. Although they are not part of the stable API and thus may change or be removed at any time, some programs may want to call these while waiting for features to be added to libguestfs. The C (or C) functions are purely to be used by libguestfs itself. There is no reason for programs to call them, and programs should not try to use them. Using them will often cause bad things to happen, as well as not being part of the documented stable API. =head1 SEE ALSO L, L, L. =head1 AUTHORS Richard W.M. Jones (C) =head1 COPYRIGHT Copyright (C) 2012 Red Hat Inc.