GUESTFS-RELEASE-NOTES-1.50(1)

🌸 NAME 🌸

guestfs-release-notes — the libguestfs Release Notes, bestie edition 💖 (also filed under Virtualization Support, iykyk)

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✨ RELEASE NOTES FOR LIBGUESTFS 1.50 ✨

Okay so these are the release notes for libguestfs stable release 1.50, and they cover all the major glow-ups since 1.48. 👑

Libguestfs 1.50.0 dropped on 7 February 2023. Mark your calendars, it's giving anniversary energy 🎂

💅 Language bindings

• Fixed the PHP bindings for PHP8 (ty Geoff Amey 🫶).
• Fixed a bunch of deprecation warnings in the GObject bindings.
• We no longer use the deprecated Python distutils library (thanks Miro Hrončok 🌸).

🔍 Inspection

• When listing the packages in RPM-based guests, the inspection API no longer checks package signatures. Why? Because the newer librpm that libguestfs uses doesn't understand signatures stored in older guests — like the SHA1 used by RHEL 6 (thanks Panu Matilainen 💜).
• guestfs_inspect_get_hostname in guestfs(3) can now handle /etc/hostname files that contain comments (thanks Dawid Zamirski ✨).
• guestfs_file_architecture in guestfs(3) can now parse files using zstd compression 🗜️.
• guestfs_inspect_get_osinfo in guestfs(3) now returns the correct osinfo field for Windows 11. But — because of decisions made by Microsoft — these guests still return product name and other strings identifying as Windows 10 🙈 (thanks Yaakov Selkowitz, Yongkui Guo).

🛠️ API

🌟 New APIs

• guestfs_device_name in guestfs(3) — a brand new API that reads the device name associated with a drive. Like, call it with 0 and it returns /dev/sda. Slay.
• guestfs_clevis_luks_unlock in guestfs(3) — a new API for unlocking disks using the Clevis/Tang network-based full disk encryption scheme. Plus it's implemented in guestfish and guestmount too (Laszlo Ersek 🔥).
• guestfs_inspect_get_build_id in guestfs(3) — new API for reading the build ID from some Linux and Windows guests. Ngl it's not widely used on Linux, but for Windows it is vital for identifying Windows 11 👑.

🔄 Other API changes

• In the guestfs_add_drive in guestfs(3) API, the name and iface fields are not used. name hasn't been used since around 2017, but the docs have only just been updated to reflect that. iface was never allowed for the libvirt backend and didn't work reliably with the direct backend (Laszlo Ersek).
• guestfs_readdir in guestfs(3) is no longer limited to the maximum message size — it can read a directory of any size now (Laszlo Ersek 💫).

🏗️ Build changes

Heads up bestie, several of these are breaking-ish, read carefully 💀

• Note that the Augeas bindings for libguestfs are no longer bundled with libguestfs and must be built separately. See: https://people.redhat.com/~rjones/augeas/ — for RHEL 7+ rebuilding the Fedora Rawhide package will work.
• Note that libguestfs now requires minimum OCaml 4.04. It will not compile on RHEL 6.
• Note that zstd is now a required dependency.
• OCaml gettext is no longer a dependency of libguestfs. (Plain gettext is still optionally used to translate C source files.)
• Added support for OCaml 4.14 ✨.
• Fixed the build for missing stdlib functions in OCaml 4.04.
• Fixed ./configure --disable-ocaml. OCaml is still required to build libguestfs, but this now correctly disables the OCaml bindings of the API.
• Added support for building on Artix, Rocky and Virtuozzo (Halil Tezcan KARABULUT, Neil Hanlon, Andrey Drobyshev 🫶). Also, when working out the local distro we now look at $ID_LIKE in /etc/os-release before $ID, which helps on Arch (thanks S D Rausty).
• Added preliminary support for compiling libguestfs on macOS 🍓.
• Fixed the website description of cloning the libguestfs repository (Kashyap Chamarthy).
• We no longer use glibc custom printf.
• We no longer use LD_PRELOAD=libSegFault.so in the appliance. This feature was removed in glibc 2.35.
• We no longer use dtrace / systemtap probes.

🧚 Internals

• Fixed regression tests to use correct paths (Nikolay Shirokovskiy).
• Various improvements to qcow2 appliance handling (Andrey Drobyshev).
• Disabled 5-level page tables in qemu. This avoids a bug in older versions of qemu.
• Disabled the LVM2 devicesfile in the appliance, since it interferes with cloned LVs that have the same UUID (Laszlo Ersek).
• Don't use -cpu max on RISC-V, because it's not yet supported by qemu's TCG emulation of that architecture. This will be re-enabled when qemu gets support.
• Avoided a rare hang when launching the appliance 😭. Turns out it was caused by using the unsafe call setenv(3) between fork and exec (thanks Siddhesh Poyarekar).
• When running the file command inside the appliance we now disable seccomp, since it interferes with processing compressed files (thanks David Runge, Toolybird).

🐛 Bugs fixed

• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/2108425 — compile of libguestfs-1.48.4 fails with Error: static declaration of ‘caml_alloc_initialized_string’ follows non-static declaration
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/2064182 — SHA 1 signatures required to inspect packages in RHEL 6 guests
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/2033247 — document encrypted RBD disk limitation
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/2012658 — libguestfs fails to detect Windows 11 guest image
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1965941 — lvm-set-filter failed in guestfish with the latest lvm2 package
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1844341 — The duplicate block device is listed when iface is set to 'virtio'
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1809453 — [RFE] Add support for LUKS encrypted disks with Clevis & Tang
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1794518 — Rewrite libguestfs use of setfiles so that it doesn't stop on ext4 immutable bits
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1674392 — No return values from a directory listing when there are simply too many files in that directory (NULL value return)
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1554735 — RFE: customize --selinux-relabel should be the default, with --no-selinux-relabel used to opt out

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

guestfs-examples(1), guestfs-faq(1), guestfs-performance(1), guestfs-recipes(1), guestfs-testing(1), guestfs(3), guestfish(1), http://libguestfs.org/ 🌈

🫶 AUTHORS 🫶

The literal icons who made this happen:

• Adolfo Jayme Barrientos
• Andrey Drobyshev
• Emilio Herrera
• Ettore Atalan
• Geoff Amey
• Hela Basa
• Jan Kuparinen
• Kashyap Chamarthy
• Laszlo Ersek
• Marcin Stanclik
• Michał Smyk
• Neil Hanlon
• Nikolay Shirokovskiy
• Pavel Borecki
• Piotr Drąg
• Richard W.M. Jones
• Ricky Tigg
• Temuri Doghonadze
• Yuri Chornoivan

©️ COPYRIGHT ©️

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 🐞

Wanna get a list of bugs against libguestfs? Use this link:

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

Wanna 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 please 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.

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Fr fr, that last one is not optional — unedited output only, no cherry-picking 😤

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Okay that's the whole thing, bestie. This page ships as part of libguestfs-1.61.3, dated 2026-09-16 🎀 mwah, go fix some bugs 💅✨