New Rust Xen guest tools

usuari

Hello,

Recently we test the new Rust Xen Guest Tools and it seems to work well

But we have a doubt about is they are in beta or actually they are in the "final" version, so we can use in production scenario.

Thank you!

olivierlambert

Frankly, I'm already using them in production without any issue. Due to the nature of what they do, I don't think the risk is big

yann

@usuari While we're pretty happy with how they work with XCP-ng as @olivierlambert says, our goal is to have those tools more generally useful for the whole Xen ecosystem, and there will likely be changes related to this. For example, it might be that a configuration becomes necessary to get the more general version to behave like they do today - naturally we would provide such a file, but it could require the installation of an additional package when that is done. (disclaimer: this is the outcome I have in mind, which does not mean it is precisely what's going to happen )

usuari

Hello,

Than you for your response!

Now we are considering to put the guest-tools in our repository (mirror) in order to get the templates automatically updated, but we couldn't find the right form to do it.

Currently we have a working and operational mirror, but when we put this:

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

Fails because couldn't find indexes:

Processing indexes: [PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPapt-mirror: can't open index gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/xen-project%252Fxen-guest-agent/packages/generic/deb-amd64///release//Packages in process_index at /usr/bin/apt-mirror line 800.
P]

We can use rsync or gitlab, but we need some indication of what we need to use.

Regards,

Houbsi

@usuari said in New Rust Xen guest tools:

Now we are considering to put the guest-tools in our repository (mirror) in order to get the templates automatically updated, but we couldn't find the right form to do it.

Currently we have a working and operational mirror, but when we put this:
deb [trusted=yes] https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/xen-project%252Fxen-guest-agent/packages/generic/deb-amd64/ release/
Fails because couldn't find indexes:
Processing indexes: [PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPapt-mirror: can't open index gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/xen-project%252Fxen-guest-agent/packages/generic/deb-amd64///release//Packages in process_index at /usr/bin/apt-mirror line 800.
P]

Please see current issue on the gitlab repository.
https://gitlab.com/xen-project/xen-guest-agent/-/issues/18

yann

@Houbsi ~~not sure what indeed happened~~ I had messed up and used links to the CI run on commit instead of that of the tag. I had to update the links to point to new job ids. Thanks for the notice!

yann

@usuari what distro/release are you using?

usuari

@yann Hello, our apt-mirror is installed on Debian 11, but the purpose is to install the guest-tools on VMs with, at least, Debian 12 OS. We want to allow each of these VMs to be able to download the package from our repository instead of having to add the line in the sources.list file of every machine.

This method gives us control if there's a future connection issue between both ends. We will have a copy of the package and won't interrupt our workflow.

Once it works well, we would move on to the other operating systems.

Thanks in advance,

Finallf

I have an ISO that I created myself with all the Drivers and tools that we would possibly need:

With the new Rust tools, can I stop using this ISO?
Any features I might miss?
I'm looking forward to having the new Windows tools.

Thank you very much for this great work.

olivierlambert

Those tools are for Linux and BSD only at the moment.

kevdog

Hey do you have actual instructions on how to compile from source? I trying to work with someone creating an arch linux AUR package and was looking for a little more input.

yann

@kevdog do you have any specific issue not addressed by the build instructions in the README?

Tristis Oris

Tools is working on Ubuntu 24 LTS.
Well it obvious, since nothing is really changed)

kevdog

@yann Yes I tried compiling with cargo. Got along some of the way until I reached this:

  Failed to locate xenstore library:
  pkg-config exited with status code 1
  > PKG_CONFIG_ALLOW_SYSTEM_LIBS=1 PKG_CONFIG_ALLOW_SYSTEM_CFLAGS=1 pkg-config --libs --cflags xenstore

  The system library `xenstore` required by crate `xenstore-sys` was not found.
  The file `xenstore.pc` needs to be installed and the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable must contain its parent directory.
  The PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable is not set.

  HINT: if you have installed the library, try setting PKG_CONFIG_PATH to the directory containing `xenstore.pc`.

Where do I get the xenstore library? I've searched the AUR and pacman official archives and I can't seem to find.

TeddyAstie

@kevdog you can get xenstore with the xen package on AUR (will be promoted to [extra] repo in the future)
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/xen

it shouldn't cause issues for boot (at worst, it will add a new non-default Xen boot entry, that shouldn't be used)

sccf

@yann said in New Rust Xen guest tools:

In Debian 10 and Ubuntu 20.04, what I see is on apt-get update on first run is:
 Certificate verification failed: The certificate is NOT trusted. The certificate issuer is unknown.  Could not handshake: Error in the certificate verification. [IP: 172.65.251.78 443]
That would look like Gitlab current SSL certificates would be depending on a root CA that only appeared in newer distros?

And on subsequent runs, then I start getting 401 replies as others reported.

I'm getting this error with a clean install of Debian 12.4... was this something that was addressed and is appearing again, or is the solution at this stage to still install manually?

yann

@sccf that looks really strange. Just made a fresh install with a Debian 12.5 netinstall ISO (disabling any desktop task, only installing the ssh-server one), and I get no such issue

runevn

I also encounter the "401 unauthorised [IP: 172.65.251.78 443]" issue on a fresh Debian 12.5.0 install.

I see that other people manually install the guest tool. But I just want to check if it expected that the "apt update" still doesn't work?

Tristis Oris

just checked installation on ubuntu 24, no problem.

runevn

@Tristis-Oris So sorry, I had a typo in the url. But I works now.