[Xen-API] RE: handling "guest tools" versions

[Andrew Peace <Andrew.Peace@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Unfortunately when someone makes a VM "appliance", they have to choose
> an arbitrary version number and stick it in there. At some point in the future
> this version will trigger the "please upgrade the guest tools" warning...
> however it's probably not going to be possible to actually upgrade the tools,
> as the appliance may be (should be?) locked down.

I think it would be great to have a solution to this problem - it definitely 
can be annoying.  The solution you suggest seems reasonable; in this case, 
would the presence of the immutable flag be sufficient to suppress the warning, 
or would all the keys (including immutable) have to be present?  The guest 
tools could be perhaps trivially extended so that they can be started in a way 
that causes the flag to be written (e.g. on Linux by checking a config file) so 
that appliance authors don't have to invent their own init scripts.

As a future addition it may also be worth thinking through how an appliance can 
indicate that it is out-of-date so that a user may be prompted to update the 
entire appliance (a GUI might display a warning that, when clicked on, follows 
a URL, for example).

Thanks,
Andy. 

> 
> To address this I propose that we add an extra flag
> 
> /local/domain/<domid>/attr/PVAddons/Immutable
> 
> Next to the existing
> 
> /local/domain/<domid>/attr/PVAddons/MajorVersion
> /local/domain/<domid>/attr/PVAddons/MinorVersion
> /local/domain/<domid>/attr/PVAddons/MicroVersion
> /local/domain/<domid>/attr/PVAddons/BuildVersion
> /local/domain/<domid>/attr/PVAddons/Installed
> 
> Which if both present in xenstore and set to "1" will override the PV-drivers-
> up-to-date warning. It will still be possible for clients to see the raw 
> version
> numbers through the API (VM_guest_metrics:PV_drivers_version map) but
> they won't be prompted to take an action which they can't perform and thus
> get annoyed IYSWIM :)
> 
> What do you think?
> 
> Cheers,
> Dave
> 
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