guestfs-release-notes-1.521

Language bindings

The Python bindings now use "bytes" (instead of "str") for the event callback message, since it may contain arbitrary 8 bit data (thanks Yonatan Shtarkman).

Also in the Python bindings, fix a rare crash, and avoid memory leaks in event callbacks (thanks Yonatan Shtarkman, Laszlo Ersek, Eric Blake).

Support for OCaml 5, and OCaml ≥ 4.07 is now the minimum (thanks Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni, Jerry James, Josh Berdine, Jürgen Hötzel, Vincent Laviron).

The OCaml bindings now release the runtime lock around calls to "guestfs_close", since that call might be long-running (for example it might have to shut down the appliance and synch disks).

Inspection

Support OpencloudOS (cunshunxia@tencent).

API

SELinux relabelling now runs in parallel, meaning it's a lot quicker (Andrey Drobyshev).

Add support for lzma and zstd compression methods in tar APIs (like "guestfs_tar_in") (Zixun LI).

"guestfs_pvs_full" previously didn't always return the correct device names. This has now been fixed.

"guestfs_btrfs_filesystem_balance" fixed so it now works with more modern btrfs tools (Jürgen Hötzel).

Tools

The guestfish(1) --key option now recognizes LVM names like /dev/mapper/rhel_bootp--73--75--123-root (Laszlo Ersek).

guestfish --key option also supports a new --key all:... selector to try the same key on all devices.

In guestmount(1) avoid calling fclose(NULL) on error paths, which might have caused a crash on some platforms.

Build changes

The "RELEASES" file (which listed release dates) has been removed and replaced with a simple "RELEASE_DATE" macro in ./configure. This should simplify builds.

Optionally passt(1) may be used for networking (Laszlo Ersek).

dhcpcd(8) is now used in preference to dh-client on Red Hat platforms.

Old Ruby "MiniTest" and "Test::Unit" dependencies replaced with new "Minitest".

Fix compatibility issues with libxml2 2.12.

Internals

On x86-64 we now use the more modern q35 machine type when running the appliance. This should perform slightly better and has more development attention from the qemu community. The change should be invisible to libguestfs users.

Fix a segmentation fault when "TERM" environment variable was set to "dumb" (Daisuke HATAYAMA).

Avoid a warning on modern Fedora which does not have /selinux (Andrey Drobyshev).

Fix build on OpenSUSE LEAP 15 or other distros with a file(1) command which did not understand the -S option (thanks Olaf Hering).

Bugs fixed

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/2247057

Remove dependency on dhcp-client in libguestfs

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/2184967

RFE: support passt for appliance networking, as QEMU userspace networking backend

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/2168578

use q35 machine type for libguestfs appliance

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1910039

virt-dib doesn't work with newer diskimage-builder version on RHEL8