Raw terminal mode

[lelvisl]

Is there a possibility in the library to implement raw terminal mode, like kubectl exec bash?

[dougm]

@hickeng implemented docker exec in https://github.com/vmware/vic , but there was quite a bit more involved than just govmomi.

Out of the box, govmomi only supports running a single command, as used in govc guest.run

[hickeng]

Yeah, there's a lot more to it in terms of pty handling and other facets in the guest if wanting to be able to do something like use guest process manager to launch bash and then attach to it.

However the lib/vspc package in VIC implements a client for the Virtual Serial Port Concentrator and the lib/portlayer/attach package has the logic to add an appropriately configured serial port to a VM for this purpose.
We also needed to add an handshake mechanism to clear some leading garbage characters - never managed to track down whether these were coming from Linux or somewhere in the vSphere stack.

That could be turned into a general serial console mechanism, but would still depends on the guest being configured for such, and the serial port configured ahead of time as I don't recall it being possible to hot-add (could be wrong).