README

vmfs6-tools - Tools to access VMFS6 filesystems
==============================================

Based fully on the vmfs-tools fork created by Weafon Tsao, which was 
based completely on vmfs-tools created by Mike Hommey, which in turn was 
based loosely upon fluidOps' VMFS implementation, vmfs6-tools contains 
additional patches to vmfs-tools necessary to allow VMFS6 support. This 
software has been altered to be coinstallable with vmfs-tools rather than 
replacing it outright, which allows ou to use this variant for VMFS6 and
the stable vmfs-tools for VMFS5 support. Most of the instructions in 
this README are based directly off of Mike Hommey's README.

This set of tools has since evolved to handle more features from VMFS, such
as extents, and allows to access VMFS6 through the standard Linux VFS6 with
the help of the FUSE framework.

While it is still work in progress and is not destined for production use
yet, it can be of some help for some people.

Build and install instructions
------------------------------

To get a full build of vmfs6-tools, you need the following prerequisites:
- gcc
- GNU make
- libuuid's development files
- pkg-config
- libfuse's development files
- asciidoc
- xsltproc
- docbook-xsl

From the above list, only the first three are strictly required.

The lack of libfuse's development files will result in the vmfs6-fuse
program not being built.

The lack of asciidoc, xsltproc or docbook-xsl will result in no
manual pages (though you can still look at the .txt files within the
source tarball).

Building vmfs6-tools should be as simple as running `make' or `gmake`,
depending on how GNU make's binary is named on your system.

To install vmfs6-tools, just run `make install' (or `gmake install').
The install location for the binaries is $prefix/sbin, $prefix/share/man
for the manual pages, where $prefix is /usr/local by default.

If you wish to install to some other place, you can override $prefix with
the command `./configure --prefix=/some/where'.

Supported platforms
-------------------

.-tools has been verified to build on GNU/Linux, FreeBSD 7.2,
Opensolaris 2009.06 and Cygwin 1.5.25.

On FreeBSD 7.2, you will need to install e2fsprogs-libuuid and pkg-config
so that the system uuid.h header is not used: it provides an incompatible
definition of the uuid_t type.

On Opensolaris, if you use the gcc-4.3.2 package instead of SUNWgcc, you
need to set EXTRA_LDFLAGS to -L/lib. This can be done with the command
`make EXTRA_LDFLAGS=-L/lib'. (you may need to use `gmake' instead of `make',
depending on your system)

On Cygwin, you need to EXTRA_LDFLAGS to -L/usr/lib/e2fsprogs to get libuuid
from there. This can be done with the command
`make EXTRA_LDFLAGS=-L/usr/lib/e2fsprogs'.