Reference

guestfs-release-notes-1.8(1)

libguestfs Release Notes

NAME

guestfs-release-notes - libguestfs Release Notes

RELEASE NOTES FOR LIBGUESTFS 1.8

These release notes only cover the differences from the previous stable/dev branch split (1.6.0). For detailed changelogs, please see the git repository, or the ChangeLog file distributed in the tarball.

New features

 - Support and packages for Debian and Ubuntu.
 - Daily builds from git repository on Debian and Ubuntu to reduce risk
   of regressions.
 - Port to ArchLinux 'pacman' (thanks Thomas S Hatch).
 - The following tools have been rewritten in C (originally in Perl):
     . virt-cat
     . virt-df
     . virt-inspector
     . virt-ls
     . virt-rescue
 - Some C tools support encrypted guests automatically.  This is
   supported in: guestfish, guestmount, virt-cat, virt-inspector,
   virt-ls.
 - New tool virt-filesystems (in C) which is a replacement for
   virt-list-filesystems and virt-list-partitions, and has a superset
   of the functionality of those tools.
 - guestfish, guestmount and the C tools use unified command line option
   parsing, so they support many common options such as '-a disk.img',
   '-d libvirt-domain', '-x', '-v'.  The old command line option
   parsing is preserved for compatibility in scripts etc.
 - guestfish no longer has any dependencies on Perl
 - New man pages containing programming examples: guestfs-examples(3) (C/C++),
   guestfs-ocaml(3), guestfs-python(3), guestfs-ruby(3).
 - Trace mode prints return values from API functions.
 - virt-inspector can list applications installed in Windows guests, along
   with a great deal of information about those applications.
 - Add support for inspecting: Linux Mint, Mandriva, FreeBSD.
 - guestfish --rw option (with no effect currently) to make potentially
   dangerous write access explicit.
 - guestfish --listen --csh for compatibility with csh, tcsh (thanks
   Eric Blake).
 - The first upstream version that introduced each API function is now
   documented in guestfs(3).
 - guestfs_last_errno allows you to retrieve the errno from the
   daemon, correctly translated to the local operating system.
 - Functions can now have optional parameters.
 - Progress bars and progress notifications can now happen for upload
   commands.
 - Appliance builder more careful about not leaving temporary files
   around in /tmp.
 - getfattr/setfattr commands added to virt-rescue.
 - ROADMAP file covers roadmap and goals for future releases.

Security

 - New SECURITY section in guestfs(3) API documentation.
 - virt-inspector no longer runs any guest commands.
 - Inspection code is more careful about avoiding very large files
   from guests which might previously have caused a denial of service.
 - FUSE calls into guestmount are now traced when using guestmount -x.

New APIs

 - add-domain
 - add-drive-opts
 - getxattr
 - inspect-get-hostname
 - inspect-get-package-format
 - inspect-get-package-management
 - inspect-get-roots
 - inspect-list-applications
 - lgetxattr
 - mkfs-opts

Internals

 - C programs now only link precisely with the libraries that they use.
 - PCRE, libmagic, hivex and libvirt libraries are now completely
   optional for building.
 - Multiple memory leaks and file descriptor leaks fixed.
 - Add a POD wrapper to unify generation of man pages and HTML files
   across all programs.
 - Source includes phony images of Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu and
   Windows guests.
 - Ruby bindings have 'make install' rule.
 - <guestfs.h> is now a single file.
 - <guestfs.h> does not require XDR headers.
 - ocaml xml-light library is no longer required to build (thanks
   Maxim Koltsov).
 - ./configure --disable-[...] for each language binding (thanks
   Maxim Koltsov).
 - Old ocaml-viewer program removed (use guestfs-browser instead).
 - New C API test type 'InitScratchFS' makes the tests run a little
   more quickly.
 - Excluded packages in the appliance are now listed in a separate
   file appliance/excludelist.in, and can be customized per-distro.

Bugs fixed

 - 663407 readlink and readlinklist returns /sysroot/ in some paths
 - 661280 virt-rescue: panic when shutting down: "/sbin/reboot: No such file or directory"
 - 657499 checksum: wrong check sum type causes umount to fail
 - 655554 Whole disk paths are not made canonical by virt-inspector
 - 654638 openssl updated to 1.0.0b libguestfs depends on exact file names
 - 652796 ruby bindings not installed by 'make install', hence omitted from the binary distribution

SEE ALSO

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

AUTHOR

Richard W.M. Jones

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) 2009-2025 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:

•

The version of libguestfs.

•

Where you got libguestfs (eg. which Linux distro, compiled from source, etc)

•

Describe the bug accurately and give a way to reproduce it.

•

Run libguestfs-test-tool(1) and paste the complete, unedited output into the bug report.

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