[Pkg-libvirt-maintainers] Bug#526718: Bug#526718: libvirt: Please enable LXC (Linux Containers) and possibly OpenVZ support in libvirt

[Daniel Pittman]

Guido Günther <agx at sigxcpu.org> writes:
> On Sun, May 03, 2009 at 11:29:46AM +1000, Daniel Pittman wrote:
>
>> Now that the Linux Containers (lxc) package has made it into unstable, it
>> would be really great if libvirt was built with support for them; the current
>> and next versions both support using them.
>
> Could you build libvirt with lxc support and verify that I works? I'd be
> happy to enable it then. Just change the --without-lxc to --with-lxc in
> debian/rules.

Well, there are two changes required to get this to build and run
correctly:

1. change --without-lxc to --with-lxc
2. Install the /usr/lib/libvirt/libvirt_lxc binary.

I added the binary helper to the libvirt0 package, but I am not sure
that is the right place — and since it is a one line addition to
package.install I didn't think it was worth generating an entire patch
for you.


Anyway, the support mostly works; I followed the example in this post,
checked against the upstream documentation:

http://openvz.org/pipermail/devel/2008-September/014314.html
http://libvirt.org/drvlxc.html

The system works, and all functions seem fine ... except for access to
the console, to my annoyance:

$ virsh --connect lxc:/// console lxc
error: Failed to get connection hostname
error: this function is not supported by the hypervisor: virConnectGetHostname

On the other hand:

$ ps axfww | tail -n 2
 9611 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/lib/libvirt/libvirt_lxc --name lxc \
                                   --console 15 --background
 9612 pts/4    Ss+    0:00  \_ /bin/sh


So, it doesn't quite work correctly.  I will have a dig around and see
if I can work out why the virConnectGetHostname method is not working,
or if that is just a virsh specific issue / assumption.

It does build, run and (apparently) work correctly outside that.

>> It would also be kind of nice if OpenVZ containers were supported, since
>> I noticed them on the way past to checking when lxc came in; I don't currently
>> use them, but they will be available again at some point.
>
> We're building with --with-openvz already.

Oh.  So you do; I assumed that virt-manager only supporting QEMU and Xen
was enough to see that, and didn't read the code.  Sorry.

Regards,
        Daniel