I have a sizeable deployment of qemu/KVM VMs already, managed through libvirt. They're all CentOS 5 or 6 hosts and guests (the kernel lacks the 9p filesystem flags, so the "mount" shared filesystem won't work).
I'd like to pass an arbitrary string (or one or more key/value pairs, or a file, if that's easiest) from the host to the guest.
Requirements: 1) don't alter the networking setup (i.e. no host/guest local network and NFS on the host) 2) don't require new/custom kernels on the guests 3) Ideally, something we can do through libvirt. But that doesn't look possible, so this isn't required
Any ideas? I haven't been able to find much on this out there that doesn't fit into one of: 1) the "mount" filesystem stuff in the libvirt XML (as I said, CentOS lacks the 9p kernel flags, so this is a no-go) 2) NFS export on the host (which won't help at all unless I add a private network, which I can't) 3) The ugly hack to set the smbios serial number to... whatever arbitrary string.