[Pkg-libvirt-maintainers] Bug#578186: libvirt0: Installation of a new vm within xen still fails to connect to a console

[IAN DELANEY]

Package: libvirt0
Version: 0.7.6-1~bpo50+1
Severity: serious
Justification: 2


Take a system on a cdrom or dvd e.g. hardy or karmic, invoke virt-manager to manage vms,
select new to invoke the wizzard installer bringing virtinst to the table, enter required info to install, full virt for a cdrom or dvd.  Pre enter to begin install, now it faulters.
The vnc console comes up with the eroor message

Console is not active for guest.

This brings the package to its knees, totally unusable.
Now, this is in fact 519809, March 2009.
I find myself reporting a bug that was found a year ago.
The point to make is that the package is still not fixed and reproduced all the difficulty and frustration that goes with this bug in place.

To give this report a little more substance, the bug has two separate faces or parts;
1 - the console is not active for guest in the vnc console,

&

2 - Attempting to attach to a tty console results in a second failure;

Invoke xm console guestname

livexen at xenalive:~$ sudo xm console karmic
xenconsole: Could not open tty : No such file or directory

or close.  This I tihnk is related to the choice of hvm to create the guest vm.
The point is that the regular tty console can also not be connected, making a double failure.

Now citing the bug number 519809,

"I can confirm - I backported libvirt 0.6.1-1 from squeeze to lenny.
The VNC console immediately works with virt-manager 0.6.0-6 after
passing the wizard for creating a new guest."

The point I wish to express is that the fix was to leave this package broken, and to backport to the later package.  Well, a year later, I installed lenny and acquired the broken package.
It took me days and days of trouble shooting and investigating virt-manager and the error messages before finally finding the bug report, not the usual activity for a regular user.
I happen to be a keen linux user and figured out enough to find the bug.

The report cites packages version number 0.6.0-6. suggesting a series of broken packages were never fixed.  My lenny came supplied with 0.4.6-10, even earlier.  I just wanted to see xen work.
I also acquired live xen cd, which features lenny as a host.  This gave me the impresiion that the supplied packages in lenny dom0 worked and were worthy to showcase management of xen.  Oh, is this so not the case.  On acquiring lenny, my first trouble came with the kernel, misfiring and failing to reach gnome.  It still warrants a separate bug report.  I only booted into xen in lenny by importing a gentoo xen kernel, as I also follow gentoo.

As a user of lenny, could I suggest that leaving these broken packages in place is not helpful to your users.  Could these packages either be fixed or withdrawn and replaced with upstream updated fixed versions that are supplied as standard packages to be used by the debian followers.Lenny is still the current release for debian, so it's the public face of debian standards and capabilities.  Can lenny be relied upon to utilsise xen as a virtualisation option, or is it a case of declaring lenny a lemon, abandoning it and relying upon squeeze as a capable debian option?


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-1-xen-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages libvirt0 depends on:
ii  libc6                  2.7-18            GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libgcrypt11            1.4.1-1           LGPL Crypto library - runtime libr
ii  libgnutls26            2.4.2-6           the GNU TLS library - runtime libr
ii  libgpg-error0          1.4-2             library for common error values an
ii  libsasl2-2             2.1.22.dfsg1-23   Cyrus SASL - authentication abstra
ii  libtasn1-3             1.4-1             Manage ASN.1 structures (runtime)
ii  libxenstore3.0         3.2.1-2           Xenstore communications library fo
ii  libxml2                2.6.32.dfsg-5     GNOME XML library
ii  zlib1g                 1:1.2.3.3.dfsg-12 compression library - runtime

Versions of packages libvirt0 recommends:
ii  lvm2                          2.02.39-6  The Linux Logical Volume Manager

libvirt0 suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information