README

virt-what
Copyright (C) 2008-2011 Red Hat Inc.
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This is a collection of scripts which you can use to work out what
sort of virtualization you are running inside.  Please read the manual
page virt-what(1) to find out how to use it.  This file is for
developers and people compiling from source.

Compiling and installing
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Build from a tarball:

  ./configure
  make

Build from git (http://git.annexia.org/?p=virt-what.git;a=summary):

  autoreconf -i
  autoconf
  ./configure
  make

Run the automated regression tests:

  make check

If you want to run it from the local directory (without needing to
install), then you have to set the PATH:

  PATH=.:$PATH virt-what

or since virt-what normally needs to be run as root:

  su -c 'PATH=.:$PATH virt-what'

To install (usually as root):

  make install

also:

  make prefix=/usr install
  make DESTDIR=/tmp/somewhere install

Contributing a virtualization test
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virt-what is especially dependent on outside contributors because it's
hard to even get access to some of the hypervisors out there, and even
for the common hypervisors there are many different versions and many
different ways for to break.  For these reasons we are especially
happy if you contribute to or even just test virt-what :-)

virt-what is a simple shell script.  Add a new hypervisor test to
'virt-what.in' ('virt-what' in this directory is a generated file).

If you can't contribute a patch, please just send us the following
data (all as root from inside the guest):

  (1) /proc/cpuinfo

  (2) dmidecode

  (3) If possible, send the output of /usr/libexec/virt-what-cpuid-helper

  (4) Any other /proc and /sys files that may be related to the
      hypervisor.

  (5) Name of the virtualization system, version, host or guest,
      and as much other information as possible.

Please send patches, test results or any other data to:

  https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/virt-tools-list

See also: http://virt-tools.org/contact/

Contributing a regression test
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In the tests/ subdirectory you'll find some existing tests.

These tests are taken from real machines, and we have a policy of
*only* adding real data here so that our regression tests are
impeccable.

The virt-what script has a hidden '--test-root' option which allows a
different root directory to be specified for these regression tests.
The tests/ subdirectory contains some alternate root filesystems
(sparsely populated with a few files taken from the real systems) for
testing.