GUESTFS-RELEASE-NOTES-1.48(1)

📦
version 1.61.3 · 13 versions
, in centos-stream 10

💖 NAME

guestfs-release-notes — the libguestfs Release Notes, bestie. This is the guestfs-release-notes-1.48(1) page, chilling in the Virtualization Support section of the manual, and it's basically the group chat recap of everything that changed. 🫶

🌸 RELEASE NOTES FOR LIBGUESTFS 1.48

Okay so these are the release notes for libguestfs stable release 1.48, and they cover all the major changes since 1.46. Libguestfs 1.48.0 was released on 14 March 2022 🎉 — iconic date, no notes.

💅 Some features removed

The following little-used, experimental or unsafe features got booted. Not me being dramatic, that's just what happened:

  • Libguestfs live — this was an experimental feature that let you (in theory) connect to an existing instance of the libguestfs daemon in a running guest. Theory is doing a lot of work in that sentence. If you wanna do this, the recommendation is to install qemu-guest-agent in the guest instead and use the APIs it provides. The related unix: backend has been removed too. And the guestfish(1) and guestmount(1) --live option now prints an error. 💀
  • The User-mode Linux (uml) backend — gone. It was an alternate hypervisor that could be used instead of qemu, but it had so many limitations, including lack of network support, and lack of qemu native features like qcow2 or network-backed disks. Also it was slower than KVM, and particular features like bulk upload/download were painfully slow 😭. Also the UML feature of Linux that it was based on often does not work. So. Yeah.
  • The 9pfs APIs guestfs_list_9p and guestfs_mount_9p — deprecated, and they now return errors. This was related to an experimental feature for passing through host filesystems to the appliance. You had to hand-hack the qemu command line for this to work and it did not fit the libguestfs model very well. Bye 👋
  • guestfs_add_drive no longer supports hotplugging (that's adding a drive after launch), and guestfs_remove_drive has been deprecated and now returns an error. Hotplugging was an unsuccessful feature which was complicated to implement and maintain, and was slow and insecure. It also only worked with the non-default libvirt backend, and was never implemented in the default direct backend. Flop era, honestly.

🦋 Language bindings

  • Fix allocation and deallocation of string lists in golang bindings (Laszlo Ersek). 🎀
  • Multiple fixes to the OCaml bindings: fix warnings, move minimum version to OCaml 4.04, replace various deprecated OCaml features with modern OCaml features.
  • Running make distclean in the rust directory now completely cleans the cargo temporary files. Slay, honestly.

🔍 Inspection

  • Fix inspection of modern Pardus GNU/Linux (Laszlo Ersek).
  • Add support for Kylin (Laszlo Ersek).
  • Add support for Rocky Linux (Neil Hanlon).
  • Inspection of guests which use LUKS encryption on top of LVM logical volumes should now work (Laszlo Ersek). That's the good stuff right there 🔥

⭐ API

New APIs

No new APIs were added in libguestfs 1.48. Nothing. Zero. An empty plate, but make it fashion 💅

Other API changes

  • guestfs_list_9p and guestfs_mount_9p are deprecated and now return errors.
  • guestfs_remove_drive has been deprecated and now returns an error.
  • In guestfs_xfs_admin the lazycounter parameter is deprecated because it is no longer supported in recent versions of XFS.
  • Partition APIs now cope with the broken MBR partition tables created by dosfstools ≥ 4.2 (Laszlo Ersek). 🛠️
  • In guestfs_md_create the chunk parameter should not be used with RAID 1. Previously it was allowed but ignored, but now it will give an error (Laszlo Ersek).
Heads up bestie: that chunk + RAID 1 thing used to be silently ignored — now it throws. If your code was quietly doing that, it's gonna notice. 🙈

🧚 Build changes

  • Multiple compiler warnings fixed and/or analyzed and suppressed (Laszlo Ersek).
  • Fix detection of optional Yara library using pkg-config instead of checking for library/header file (Laszlo Ersek).
  • Update valgrind suppressions for glibc 2.35, OCaml 4.13 and libvirt 7.7. make check-valgrind works again. 🎉
  • If using libvirt ≥ 3.8.0, we now use <interface> to create the appliance network interface instead of adding qemu command line parameters (Laszlo Ersek).
  • The guestfs-release-notes(1) page was a broken link, but it has now been restored as a new page that links to the release notes from each stable release. Glow-up complete ✨

🧠 Internals

The libc API strerror_r(3) is difficult to use correctly because of differing signatures in glibc and other libc. A wrapper guestfs_int_strerror has been created to hide the differences. Lowkey a hero move.

💀 Bugs fixed

🌈 SEE ALSO

guestfs-examples(1), guestfs-faq(1), guestfs-performance(1), guestfs-recipes(1), guestfs-testing(1), guestfs(3), guestfish(1), http://libguestfs.org/ — go read them, they're all baddies 💜

👑 AUTHORS

  • Laszlo Ersek
  • Neil Hanlon
  • Richard W.M. Jones

Copyright (C) 2009-2025 Red Hat Inc.

📜 LICENSE

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.

🐛 BUGS

To get a list of bugs against libguestfs, use this link:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?component=libguestfs&product=Virtualization+Tools

To report a new bug against libguestfs, use this link:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?component=libguestfs&product=Virtualization+Tools

When reporting a bug, please supply:

  • The version of libguestfs.
  • Where you got libguestfs (eg. which Linux distro, compiled from source, etc)
  • Describe the bug accurately and give a way to reproduce it.
  • Run libguestfs-test-tool(1) and paste the complete, unedited output into the bug report.
Fr fr, do NOT trim that output. The complete, unedited output is the whole point. 🫶

That's the whole page bestie 💖 — brought to you by libguestfs-1.61.3, dated 2026-09-16, and this guestfs-release-notes-1.48(1) recap is officially over. Go forth and never hotplug a drive again ✨🦋

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