Hi Mark,

On 2020-07-23 21:16, Mark Post wrote:
> On 7/23/20 3:17 AM, Stefan Raspl wrote:
>> I could imagine writing a simplistic tool
>> that displays all virtualization levels down to the CEC, with the potential 
>> to
>> extend it in the future.
> 
> Hi, Stefan,
> 
> I was thinking more in terms of command line switches that determine
> what should be returned. For example:
> cmdname --guest       Would return the name of my running guest
> cmdname --host        Would return the name of the z/VM or KVM host.
> cmdname --lpar        Would return the name of the LPAR.
> cmdname --cec Would return the name of the CEC. Or CPC, since I think
> that's the current IBM name.

The problem with that is that you will get into trouble as soon as you consider
2nd-level installs where you have multiple guests and hypervisors to
display/query. We'd need multiple switches to address the different levels of
guests, and things get ugly pretty fast. Any ideas how to address that?

> And possibly, something like:
> cmdname --all Which would return the names of all these things, possible
> as "name=value" pairs. 
> There's already the systemd-detect-virt command to tell you what
> hypervisor is in use, so that wouldn't be needed. I can't say for sure
> if many people would be interested in finding out they're running 6
> layers of virtualization deep and what each of those is. If someone does
> want that, they should speak up.
> 
> I believe something like this would allow for easy scripting by system
> administrators. Of course, others may have differing opinions.

I would argue that if you want to script, what you really want is a front-end in
qclib that can be accessed by scripts. Yes, querying qclib is certainly more
complicated than interacting with a command line tool like you layed out above,
but unless we come up with a smart way for that tool's cmdline switches, it will
likely not do what you need.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Kind regards

Stefan Raspl


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