Rust guest tools 0.3.0

Olivier Lambert -

We just published a new release of our new Rust guest agent for Linux and BSDs operating systems, in its version 0.3.0!

The complete changelog is available here.

APT repositories

It took us some time to do it, but now it's done: the Debian package is automatically built on Gitlab and available as via a Debian repository. For example, you can create a file called /etc/apt/sources.list.d/xen-guest-agent.list and put this inside:

deb [trusted=yes] https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/xen-project%252Fxen-guest-agent/packages/generic/deb-amd64/ release/

It's not (yet) signed. To install them, just do a apt update and apt install xen-guest-agent.

Any new release will automatically update the package in the repository, so a simple apt update and apt upgrade will give you the latest version of our guest agent. Enjoy!

🦺
Want to test the pre-release builds? Just replace release/ by main/ in your xen-guest-agent.list file, and apt update (and apt upgrade if there's an available version). You'll taste the latest bits from the main branch. Don't do that in production obviously!

New features

A major change that's not really visible (but giving you the great new APT repositories) is the fact that all executables and packages for supported platforms (Linux/FreeBSD) are available from Gitlab CI pipelines.

Then, the agent can now collect the available and total guest memory inside FreeBSD guests.

Also, our command line for the agent now provides 2 extra arguments: --stderr and --loglevel for assistance on troubleshooting.

Finally, all the guest agent logs are now sent to syslog by default on any Unix-like OS.

Bug fixes

Thanks to our great community testing on our dedicated forum threads, we fixed an issue when plugging/unplugging a virtual NIC while the VM is online. It was reported by Tom from the great Lawrence Systems Youtube channel.

The other issue was removing a requirement from the agent on the libxenstore.so development symlink. Now, only the runtime library package is required. Thanks to the great work of Wenzel on the xenstore Rust crate!