MinGW: It's got an icon and it works!

As you can see from the screenshot below, I addressed Nicu's complaint and added a simple icon to the virsh (virt shell) EXE file. Here's how to do that again using all open source tools. We also a fixed a rather embarrassing endianness bug in our XDR implementation, and so virsh/libvirt can talk to remote libvirtd servers.

MinGW: Screenshots

Previously I showed you how to build software on Fedora which will run on Windows. You can run this software on Fedora using Wine, but it's also nice to know that it even runs on a real Windows machine. Here are some screenshots of the installer running under Windows XP. Remember that this was entirely created on a Fedora Linux system, using completely open source software:


The menubar across the top of the screen comes from virt-viewer. Windows is running virtualized.




Notice the desktop shortcuts for each application, added by nsiswrapper automatically. In future we'll actually want to disable some of these since they don't really make sense for command line applications.


Who's the "surfer dude"?

virt-mem 0.2.9

I'm pleased to announce the latest alpha release of the virt-mem tools, version 0.2.9.

These are tools for system administrators which let you find things like kernel messages, process lists and network information of your guests.

For example:

  virt-uname
    'uname' command, shows OS version, architecture, etc.
  virt-dmesg
    'dmesg' command, shows kernel messages
  virt-ps
    'ps' command, shows process list

Nothing needs to be installed in the guest for this to work, and the tools are specifically designed to allow easy scripting and integration with databases and monitoring systems.

Source is available from the web page here:

http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-mem/

The latest version (0.2.9) reworks the internals substantially so that we have direct access to basically any kernel structure, and this will allow us to quickly add the remaining features that people have asked for (memory usage information, lists of network interfaces and so on).

As usual, patches, feedback, suggestions etc. are very welcome!

Binaries are available for Fedora through this link:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=450713

virt-ps and the Red Hat Summit

Tomorrow (Wednesday) through to Friday is the Red Hat Summit in Boston. If you're coming, please make sure to see my talk with Dan Berrange on the "Virtualization Toolbox", or all the little, useful tools we've been writing to help you manage your virt systems. That talk is tomorrow, Wednesday 18th June, some time after 11am.

As I mentioned previously on this blog I'm working on deep inspection of the internals of running virtual machines, and dressing this up as familiar, easy to use command line tools, such as virt-df and virt-dmesg. I'll be talking a lot more about those tomorrow, so I don't want to spoil the surprises.

The real question is whether I'll get virt-ps (process listings) working today. Getting the process listing out of a stuck virtual machine is immensely useful to find out what's going on with the machine. For example, did it blow up because there are too many Apache processes? Or is some other daemon causing trouble? I had an initial implementation of this working, but it was rather slow and unsatisfactory because of the all the guessing and heuristics it had to do. In the meantime, I discovered that getting the Linux kernel version is quite easy, and once you know the kernel version you immediately reduce the amount of heuristics you need by a large factor. So the new implementation should be much faster.

Faster, but it doesn't work at the moment. Today is the final push on this - can I get virt-ps working in time for the demo tomorrow?