Libguestfs (http://libguestfs.org) is a library and set of tools for securely and automatically performing many operations on disk images, from creating them to finding out what is in them.

It is a C library with bindings in many different programming languages. It also comes with many "virt-*" tools for performing common operations, such as building operating systems from scratch (virt-builder), resizing operating systems (virt-resize), sparsifying disk images (virt-sparsify), editing files (virt-edit) and more.

In this 15 minute lightning talk, Richard Jones will talk about a few of the latest features from the recently announced version 1.24. This will include a demonstration of how virt-builder can build a new OS image in well under 60 seconds. How you can really compress huge disk images down to relatively small files using virt-sparsify and xz. And how you can use virt-sysprep to "sysprep" cloned virtual machines.