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Virtualization

In this section, we cover discussion of Fedora virtualization technologies on the @et-mgmnt-tools-list, @fedora-xen-list, and @libvirt-list lists.

Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley

Enterprise Management Tools List

This section contains the discussion happening on the et-mgmt-tools list


Fedora Virtualization List

This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-virt list.

New Release libguestfs 1.0.41

Richard Jones announced[1] "version 1.0.41 of Package-x-generic-16.pnglibguestfs, the library for accessing and modifying virtual machine filesystems."

New Features:

  • squashfs and cramfs support
  • better support for read-only access to drives
  • many problems with string handling in different language bindings have been fixed
  • internationalization support
  • ext4 support improved on RHEL 5
  • improved support for running commands in the guest
  • support for skipping tests
  • lvresize and ext2/3 resize support
  • pvremove, vgremove, lvremove commands
  • sleep command
  • IRC channel #libguestfs on FreeNode

See previous release announcement for 1.0.15 in FWN#174 [2].


New virt-inspector Features

Richard Jones announced[1]

"I've added a few extra features to virt-inspector[2] (in Package-x-generic-16.pnglibguestfs[3] >= 1.0.42)."

"First up is a new 'query mode'" which prints "out some useful facts about the virtual machine such as whether it's fully virtualized or needs a Xen hypervisor, and whether it has various paravirt drivers installed."

"Secondly (not covered in the manpage), virt-inspector will try to discover whether a VM contains the right initrd drivers and module configuration to boot under various hypervisors. So for example it can tell you whether a guest has the virtio drivers available at boot time to boot from a virtio disk."

Fedora Virtualization Status

Mark McLoughlin looked[1] on to Fedora 12 in his latest virtualization status report. "Okay, so F-11 is done and dusted. Onwards to F-12!" "Here's what the schedule looks like:"

2009-07-28 Feature Freeze (53 days)
2009-08-04 Beta Freeze (60 days)
2009-09-22 Final Development Freeze (109 days)
2009-10-20 Compose & Stage Release Candidate (137 days)

Highlights of the report included:

  • A thorough run-down of virtualization related bugs.
  • "Dan Berrange was interviewed about virtualization in Fedora 11."[2]
  • "Updates are being pushed regularily to the virt-preview repository"[3]
  • "Jeremy Fitzhardinge's latest submission of the Xen Dom0 patches for

2.6.31 has caused the kernel community to get themselves into a bit of a flap. LWN has a nice article on the 'discussion'"[4]

Gerd Hoffmann followed[5] up with some details on the controversial bits. "lapic + ioapic. That is the big hot topic. Current code lacks sensible interfaces to the different apic types out there in the wild. The current dom0 patches hook just into that mess instead of cleaning it up. Right now it looks like Jeremy has to sort that mess to get the xen bits in, using the to-be-created apic interfaces."

"No way the apic stuff will make it into the 2.6.31 merge window opening RSN, the work on that barely started. Thus we can expect functional dom0 support upstream in 2.6.32 earliest."

"Also noteworthy: There is a discussion on xen-devel regarding the future of the xen linux trees. Which one should be used & maintained and so on." "Looks like Keir seriously considers switching xen-unstable to the pv_ops kernel by default. YES! FINALLY! Well, it is probably to early to uncork the champagne, but I think we can at least put a bottle into the fridge ;)"


Libvirt List

This section contains the discussion happening on the libvir-list.

New Release libvirt 0.6.4

Daniel Veillard announced[1] a new Package-x-generic-16.pnglibvirt release, version 0.6.4.

"There is a number of new things in that release, but as happens in time-based releases some are not fully complete, for example the OpenNebula driver was added but it still need a bit of work on the detection code and a bit of cleanup to avoid a GPL/AFS licencing issue, so please don't enable it except for test builds. We also have a new set of Interface config APIs but they are not yet implemented by a driver and the XML import/export routines are not there yet. Still there is a lot of things to use and discover in this release as you can see below:"

New features:

  • new API virStorageVolCreateXMLFrom (Cole Robinson)
  • full VBox graphic capabilities (Pritesh Kothari)
  • Interface config APIs (Laine Stump)
  • APIs for domain XML conversions (Daniel Berrange)
  • initial version of OpenNebula driver (Abel Miguez Rodriguez)

Improvements:

  • cleanups and doc on virExec (Cole Robinson)
  • error reporting in QEmu migrations (Cole Robinson)
  • better path and driver detection in VBox (Pritesh Kothari)
  • avoid caching QEMU driver capabilities(Cole Robinson)
  • multiple graphics elements definitions (Pritesh Kothari)
  • LSB init header init.d improvements (Frederik Himpe)
  • special erro code for invalid operations (Daniel Berrange)
  • dlopen error logging (Daniel Berrange)
  • fix UUID and name uniqueness (Daniel Berrange)
  • improvement on VBox initialization (Pritesh Kothari and Dan Berrange)
  • "Host only" and "Internal" network in VBox (Pritesh Kothari)
  • add utility virExecDaemonize (Cole Robinson)
  • enable bridges without IP (Ludwig Nussel)
  • 'make -s' silencing (Daniel Berrange)
  • test case for exercising the event loop (Daniel Berrange)
  • virsh commands vol-clone and vol-create-from (Cole Robinson)
  • new xend don't use [] around cpumaps (Tatsuro Enokura)
  • add the CIL mutex lock checker (Daniel Berrange)
  • fix some LXC error code (Amy Griffis)
  • virInterface python bindings (Daniel Berrange)
  • fix to the example code for event handling (Pritesh Kothari)
  • always add location informations to logging (Daniel Berrange)
  • python domain events example and binding (Daniel Berrange)
  • PPC Qemu Machine Type update (Thomas Baker)

libvirt 0.6.3 was released[2] on April 24.