[SOLVED] Old QEMU-AGENT in Fedora ISO 1.41 (And how to get the new one!)

[Jean-Luc Boyer]

Hello everyone,

In this post (https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/w...-agent-crash-during-backup.38644/#post-191117), we had a problem of taking backup with a Windows 2012 R2 server with the RDS (Terminal Server) service that uses the User Disk Profile (UPD). With this system, when the agent attempted a backup, the QEMU agent crashed and nothing happened. We concluded that our Windows 2012R2 installation had a design or configuration problem.

However we searched further and realized that the version of the QEMU windows agent is completely outdated, since the version returned is about 5 years old and indicates version 0.12. Yet we have installed ISO version 1.41 on the Fedora website. We read that Red Hat is well aware of this problem but does not seem to be moving to resolve the situation.

So to take advantage of version 2.11 of the Windows QEMU Agent, you must compile the agent yourself.

Here's how :

- Install the version of Fedora 27 64 bits (desktop or server, it does not matter).
- Prepare the environment mingw64

In the Fedora terminal:

yum install mingw64-pixman mingw64-glib2 mingw64-gmp mingw64-SDL mingw64-pkg-config
yum install mingw64-winpthreads-static

- Download and build from the source QEMU

git clone https://github.com/qemu/qemu
cd qemu
git submodule update --init dtc
./configure --enable-guest-agent --cross-prefix = x86_64-w64-mingw32- --with-vss-sdk = / root / vss
make msi -j

- Download the VSS SDK (To use Windows VSS functions) inside your fedora

Microsoft website: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=23490

Type:

./qemu/scripts/extract-vsssdk-headers setup.exe



Then copy the qemu-ga-x86_64.msi to your Windows VM and install it.

This update fixes a ton of bugs since version 0.12.


Reference: http://chtos.net/?p=249 (There appears to be an error in the assembling order of the agent)

BTW: If someone from Red Hat reads this message, could you update the Fedora ISO so that the agent version is up-to-date? It would help the community!

 

[tom]

Did you try these?

https://fedorapeople.org/groups/vir...ownloads/archive-qemu-ga/qemu-ga-win-7.4.5-1/

 

[Jean-Luc Boyer]

Hello,

We had already done the test and it still brings us the same old version of agent (with the agent you have indicated), version 0.12.1 which is very old. When we perform the same check with our compiled agent, this tells us version 2.11.50.

So there is a huge mistake at fedora with regard to the version of the qemu agent under windows.

Can you do something because if we have problems with their agents, I imagine that it must impact the entire community (and especially proxmox users)?

 

[tom]

Please report this to the Fedora project, see:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Windows_Virtio_Drivers#Bugs

 

[Jean-Luc Boyer]

Ok thanks you!

 

[Jean-Luc Boyer]

For those interested in following the evolution of this problem, here is my ticket open at RedHat :

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1542121

 

[Jean-Luc Boyer]

There is the answer of Red Hat :

"> Cole Robinson 2018-02-05 11:58:52 EST
Thanks for the report, this is a known issue. That's the build that was shipped in RHEL up until recently, it's very old for historical reasons. New builds are available but I need to update the public build scripts to include them

 

[Frank_Pit]

Hi Jean-Luc. I see that in the reference link you provided (chtos.net) there is an attached Zip with QEMU Guest Agent. I installed it and checking on PVE console the version is 2.11.50 (in download link the version 2.10.50 maybe is incorrect). Thank you!

 

[Jean-Luc Boyer]

Hello Frank,

In fact, we only followed the procedure to build our agent from this page. Because with the fedora ISO, when querying the agent from proxmox, it returns the version 0.12.1. In fact, RedHat are aware of the problem. Hoping that they update theirs for the agent at Fedora.