New guest tools ISO for Linux and FreeBSD. Can you help with the tests?

gskger

@stormi Installed the new testing guest tools on my two playlab hosts (yum update xcp-ng-pv-tools --enablerepo=xcp-ng-testing) and re-run most of my earlier tests.

From fresh install to testing guest tools on FreePBX 15 (4a-c)

[root@freepbx ~]# bash /mnt/Linux/install.sh
Detected `Sangoma Linux release 7.8.2003 (Core) ' (sangoma version 7).

The following changes will be made to this Virtual Machine:
  * update arp_notify sysctl.
  * packages to be installed/upgraded:
    - xe-guest-utilities-7.20.0-8.x86_64.rpm
    - xe-guest-utilities-xenstore-7.20.0-8.x86_64.rpm

Continue? [y/n] y

Preparing...                          ################################# [100%]
Updating / installing...
   1:xe-guest-utilities-xenstore-7.20.################################# [ 50%]
   2:xe-guest-utilities-7.20.0-8      ################################# [100%]

You should now reboot this Virtual Machine.

From current guest tools to testing guest tools on FreePBX 15 (4b-c)

[root@freepbx ~]# bash /mnt/Linux/install.sh
Detected `Sangoma Linux release 7.8.2003 (Core) ' (sangoma version 7).

The following changes will be made to this Virtual Machine:
  * packages to be installed/upgraded:
    - xe-guest-utilities-7.20.0-8.x86_64.rpm
    - xe-guest-utilities-xenstore-7.20.0-8.x86_64.rpm

Continue? [y/n] y

Preparing...                          ################################# [100%]
Updating / installing...
   1:xe-guest-utilities-xenstore-7.20.################################# [ 33%]
   2:xe-guest-utilities-7.20.0-8      ################################# [ 67%]
Cleaning up / removing...
   3:xe-guest-utilities-7.20.0-1      ################################# [100%]

You should now reboot this Virtual Machine.

Managent agent now is 7.20.0-8, IP is correct and live migration as well as shutdown/reboot worked without an issue.

What I found strange is that for 4b-c (FreePBX) and 3b-c (Centos), I have to reboot the VM to make the new management agent show on the VMs general tab.
I can not remember that I had to do that in my last test and it is not necessary for 1b-c (Debian 10) or 2b-c (Ubuntu 20.04). No need to reboot 1a-c, 2a-c, 3a-c and 4a-c since the management agent is shown correctly right away.

stormi

Thanks @gskger. I think the fact that some b-c transitions require a service restart and others don't may be caused by differences in the post-update scripts that are run. Maybe the DEB packages we made restart the service while the RPM ones don't when the tools are updated.

This might already have been the case before, in Citrix tools, or maybe not. I don't think it's a big deal but it's interesting to note that difference. I'll try to have a look if time permits.

If curious, the package definitions are located at https://github.com/xcp-ng-rpms/xcp-ng-pv-tools/tree/master/SOURCES. debian-* files for debian, and xe-guest-utilities.spec. I think that not restarting the service automatically after an update is default behaviour in RPM world. I don't know about debian's position on this.

gskger

@stormi Perfect! Ok for me ! Any upcoming tests on the new guest tools? Otherwise I would try something else with my playlab, loosing the ability to conduct consistent tests .

stormi

@gskger no upcoming tests on the new guest tools. You can break your lab

gskger

@stormi Nice! Looking forward to when the new gest tools are available.

onyxfire

Just found this thread and tested the updates on the latest updated XCP-ng. They install fine on the Rocky Linux 8.4 GA release but there is a minor issue in the logs when you start the xe daemon:

Started LSB: @BRAND_GUEST@ daemon providing host integration services.

Looks like the branding isn't updated in your RPM.

onyxfire

Also testing Rocky Linux with test tools provided the following results:

Shutdown: OK
Startup: OK
Live Migration: OK

stormi

@onyxfire Thanks for the report. I'll fix it.

stormi

@onyxfire This is now fixed in the latest xcp-ng-pv-tools package in the testing repo. Can you test it?

onyxfire

@stormi Sorry for the delay in testing. This looks to be fixed now. Thanks!

kdm

I'd like to help: I plan to test this against my Mint Linux 20.1 VM and my openmediavault 5 VM.
Question on "3.3 clean shutdown and reboot working". Any time I shutdown XCp-ng, I normally shutdown each VM first. Since I have guest tools installed, should I be able to simply shut down XCP-ng and rely on it to politely shut down my VMs?
Thanks.

stormi

@kdm On a pool with several hosts, xe host-disable uuid=... then xe host-shutdown|reboot uuid=... will evacuate the host towards the other hosts of the pool.

On a single host pool, the same commands will attempt a clean shutdown on each VM.

theAeon

Seems the SUSE Leap 15 assumes the ability to run SysVinit scripts but as of 15.3 (and tumbleweed) insserv-compat is not included and only systemd scripts are supported. It seems there's already a functional systemd script used on RHEL/Fedora, so I have to imagine this is a simple fix of the install.sh.

EDIT: did some pull reqs-should fix MicroOS identification at the least. Could probably handle Tumbleweed the same way. Tried my hand at some systemd rpms too, but god knows if they work.

stormi

Thanks. I'll look at your PRs.

I'm all for adding the ability to extract distro data from /etc/os-release (see my issue there: https://github.com/xenserver/xe-guest-utilities/issues/108) so I'll likely backport the commit that was contributed upstream. This won't change install.sh (you'd still need to use the -m and -d) but it should make the service able to start and report OS and version in many additional distros.

For systemd vs sysvinit we need either to create twice more DEBs and RPMs and make install.sh able to decide on which to use depending on the distro, or include both kinds of service files in the packages and use post-install scripts to decide which to enable.

stormi created this issue in xenserver/xe-guest-utilities

closed Use `/etc/os-release` for recent distros #108

theAeon

@stormi Fun fact with that one, I actually merged #108 (pr #116) in with one of my two PRs. No backporting needed, really, it just goes right at the end of the detection logic.

The biggest issue with the systemd file as it stands is that it has directories pointing to the ones used on FCOS rather than /usr/sbin. Split that off in the other PR.

thomas0046

@stormi Hi Stormi, firstly, thx for all good work U guys are doing ! And I have problem, that Im not able to get IP address info from my Rocky Linux 8.4(I have only one NIC conencted eth0).
When Im using newest guest tools from EPEL repo (xe-guest-utilities-latest version 7.21.0.1.el8), those tools cant be started at all.
When Im using newest guest tools from xcp-ng-testing repo(ISO:guest-tools-8.2.0-9.xcpng8.2, tools version 7.20.0-9) as you suggested in some previous post, those tools works, I can even get correct information about OS release, and virtualization state is reporting as "Optimized(version 7.20 installed)", but in network tab, no guest IP address is reported (unknown).

What is strange is that I had RC version of Rocky Linux 8.3 laying around from testing in the past, so I tried to install guest tools from my platform (Citrix 7.0), it is able to report IP address correctly.

That leads to me to think, that somehow Rocky Linux 8.4 isnt fully supported yet ?
If you need more info(logs/screens), please let my know, thx

stormi

@thomas0046 @Darkbeldin tried to reproduce, but the IP address is correctly reported in Xen Orchestra with Rocky 8.4 and the guest tools from XCP-ng (btw you don't need to pull the guest tools from the testing repo now, as they have been pushed as a regular update).

stormi

I realize I haven't announced it on this thread (I thought I had) : the guest tools ISO that was tested in this thread have been released as an update to XCP-ng.

See https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2021/06/28/summer-security-and-bugfix-updates/

You can still provide feedback, of course, but you don't need to try to pull packages from the testing repository for now.

Pierre Briec

Hi @stormi ,

I have an Ipfire fresh VM which is not detected by the installer. How can I add support for this distro which seems to be LFS (linux from scratch) based.
I would like to have the guest-tools installed on it.
Can you help me please or tell me how can i add it manually?
I can provide all information you want.

thanks in advance
Pierre

stormi

Hi @Pierre-Briec,

If Ipfire is based on LFS, I suppose there's no RPM nor DEB package management. In this case you can use the .tgz tarball and install it manually, and make sure to install enable the xe-linux-distribution service (using the provided initscript or the systemd unit). But maybe there's a way to install a RPM or a DEB package through some compatibility tool, in which case you may try them.

You may also have to tweak the xe-linux-distribution file to make it recognize your distro. If it has a /etc/os-release file, then future versions of xe-linux-distribution, not released yet, will recognize it automatically.

Ideally, it would be nice to work towards pushing the tools directly in the distro, so that you could install them from their repositories when needed. We can provide some help if a packager gets it touch with us or if you want to try to contribute them yourself.