Xen “virt-manager” GUI / libvirt development progress

Hugh Brock, Jeremy Katz and myself have been working hard on various aspects of the Xen GUI management tools. Jeremy’s re-factored the xenguest-install.py script from Fedora Core 5 into a formal python module / library API called ‘xeninst’ which should be appearing in rawhide fairly soon. Hugh, meanwhile has been tackling the Xen guest installation problem from the UI side, producing a wizard for the virt-manager app to collect the info neccessary provision new guest instances. Today we reached the major milestone of connecting the wizard to the xeninst libray and were able to perform a (near) end-to-end graphical install of a guest OS. With seemless progression from the data collection wizard, to the embedded VNC (or serial) console in virt-manager, installation of Xen guest operating systems in a Fedora host ought to become a whole lot more friendly RSN. A few days more bug fixing / tidying up loose ends and we’ll release another snapshot virt-manager and make re-try pushing RPMs into rawhide for wider testing. Today also saw a major new release of libvirt providing much better support for hardware assisted virtualization (aka HVM / VT), automated testing via the mock hypervisor driver, and a plethora of bug fixes / minor feature enhancements.