From Fedora Project Wiki
Under Construction
Work to update this page for F12 has only just begun. You can see a copy of the F11 page here.
Work to update this page for F12 has only just begun. You can see a copy of the F11 page here.
Virtualization
Virtualization in Fedora 12 includes major changes, and new features, that continue to support KVM, Xen, and many other virtual machine platforms.
The final list of virt features for Fedora 12[1] looks like:
- KSM - Allow KVM guest virtual machines to share identical memory pages. This is especially useful when running multiple guests from the same or similar base operating system image. Because memory is shared, the combined memory usage of the guests is reduced.
- KVM Huge Page Backed Memory - Enable KVM guests to use huge page backed memory in order to reduce memory consumption and improve performance by reducing CPU cache pressure.
- KVM NIC Hotplug - Allow the addition of a guest network interface (NIC) a guest virtual machine without needing to restart the guest.
- KVM qcow2 Performance - Improve the I/O performance of virtual machines using disk images in the qcow2 image format.
- KVM Stable Guest ABI - Allow guest virtual machines to be presented with the same application binary interface across QEMU upgrades.
- libguestfs - A library for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images. guestfish is an interactive shell tool for editing virtual machine disk images. Technically, this actually launched in F11, but not as a "Feature"[2].
- Network Interface Management - Provide tools to easily set up commonly used network configurations, like bridges, bonds, vlan's and sensible combinations thereof, in particular for virtualized hosts.
- SR-IOV - Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) is a PCI feature which allows virtual functions (VF) to be created that share the resources of a physical function (PF).
- VirtgPXE - Replace the deprecated etherboot pxe booting infrastructure with the more modern and currently upstream supported gpxe.
- Virt Privileges - Improve security by adjusting the privileges of QEMU processes managed by libvirt. Also, allow KVM to be used by unprivileged users.
- Virt Storage Management - Enable VM hosts to discover new SAN storage and issue NPIV operations.
- Libvirt Technology Compatibility Kit - Provide a functional test suite for virtualization and report on hypervisor compatability. "Note, FESCo didn't approve TCK as a feature, but that should't stop us pimping it :-)"
Xen Kernel Support
The kernel package in Fedora 11 supports booting as a guest domU, but will not function as a dom0 until such support is provided upstream. Work is ongoing and hopes are high that support will be included in kernel 2.6.30 and Fedora 12.
The most recent Fedora release with dom0 support is Fedora 8.
Booting a Xen domU guest within a Fedora 11 host requires the KVM based xenner. Xenner runs the guest kernel and a small Xen emulator together as a KVM guest.
KVM requires hardware virtualization features in the host system.
Systems lacking hardware virtualization do not support Xen guests at this time.
Systems lacking hardware virtualization do not support Xen guests at this time.
For more information refer to: