Dropping command line tools

[YannickTeKulve]

Hi

We run Talos linux with Xen Orchestra. Talos is a very minimal OS and does not have a shell and command line tools are not available. This breaks the guest utilities in multiple ways since shell commands (and the corresponding commandline tools) are used in several places. I fixed this issue for getting the IP address, and you can find the solution here. However, I know multiple people are facing this issue, so I would love to bring this solution back to the main repository.

I think it is generally better to avoid using command-line tools for such a low-level tool. But fixing the issue of fetching IP addresses for now is good enough for us.

To use the net library, we do need static linking. I am not sure about the implications for other operating systems.

[olivierlambert]

Hi,

I don't know if you spotted this and that, but our Rust re-implementation is getting rid of any command line tool. If you want to make some tests on your side with our prototype, let us know :)

[YannickTeKulve]

Hi,

I saw it! very cool. I tried the prototype, but it failed on startup (but didn't spend a lot of time on it, maybe doing something wrong that should be very obvious). But I also don't want use a prototype in production. So for now we use our fork, but definitely want to replace it with the rust version when it's ready 👍

[ydirson]

I tried the prototype, but it failed on startup

Obviously it's not really the place to discuss this, don't hesitate to submit feedback in the relevant PR ;)

[LunfanZhang]

Hi,

I saw it! very cool. I tried the prototype, but it failed on startup (but didn't spend a lot of time on it, maybe doing something wrong that should be very obvious). But I also don't want use a prototype in production. So for now we use our fork, but definitely want to replace it with the rust version when it's ready 👍

Hi @YannickTeKulve you could submit a PR here directly.

[olivierlambert]

Maybe it's time to consider contributing to the Rust Guest tool project which is hosted inside the Xen Project @LunfanZhang ? (ie directly "upstream").

We made serious progress, and it works pretty well on Linux and BSDs. So joining our efforts might avoid diluting community efforts :)