407a281a8e
This reverts commit e4b980c853d2114b25fa805a84ea288384416221. When a binary links against a .a archive (as opposed to a shared library), any symbols which are marked as 'weak' get silently dropped. As a result when the binary later runs, those 'weak' functions have an address of 0x0 and thus crash when run. This happened with virtlogd and virtlockd because they don't link to libvirt.so, but instead just libvirt_util.a and libvirt_rpc.a. The virRandomBits symbols was weak and so left out of the virtlogd & virtlockd binaries, despite being required by virHashTable functions. Various other binaries like libvirt_lxc, libvirt_iohelper, etc also link directly to .a files instead of libvirt.so, so are potentially at risk of dropping symbols leading to a later runtime crash. This is normal linker behaviour because a weak symbol is not treated as undefined, so nothing forces it to be pulled in from the .a You have to force the linker to pull in weak symbols using -u$SYMNAME which is not a practical approach. This risk is silent bad linkage that affects runtime behaviour is not acceptable for a fix that was merely trying to fix the test suite. So stop using __weak__ again. Signed-off-by: Daniel P. Berrange <berrange@redhat.com>
Libvirt API for virtualization
Libvirt provides a portable, long term stable C API for managing the virtualization technologies provided by many operating systems. It includes support for QEMU, KVM, Xen, LXC, bhyve, Virtuozzo, VMware vCenter and ESX, VMware Desktop, Hyper-V, VirtualBox and the POWER Hypervisor.
For some of these hypervisors, it provides a stateful management daemon which runs on the virtualization host allowing access to the API both by non-privileged local users and remote users.
Layered packages provide bindings of the libvirt C API into other languages including Python, Perl, PHP, Go, Java, OCaml, as well as mappings into object systems such as GObject, CIM and SNMP.
Further information about the libvirt project can be found on the website:
License
The libvirt C API is distributed under the terms of GNU Lesser General
Public License, version 2.1 (or later). Some parts of the code that are
not part of the C library may have the more restrictive GNU General
Public License, version 2.1 (or later). See the files COPYING.LESSER
and COPYING for full license terms & conditions.
Installation
Libvirt uses the GNU Autotools build system, so in general can be built and installed with the usual commands. For example, to build in a manner that is suitable for installing as root, use:
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var
$ make
$ sudo make install
While to build & install as an unprivileged user
$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr
$ make
$ make install
The libvirt code relies on a large number of 3rd party libraries. These will
be detected during execution of the configure script and a summary printed
which lists any missing (optional) dependencies.
Contributing
The libvirt project welcomes contributions in many ways. For most components the best way to contribute is to send patches to the primary development mailing list. Further guidance on this can be found on the website:
https://libvirt.org/contribute.html
Contact
The libvirt project has two primary mailing lists:
- libvirt-users@redhat.com (for user discussions)
- libvir-list@redhat.com (for development only)
Further details on contacting the project are available on the website: