From Fedora Project Wiki
History of Virtualization in Fedora
Fedora has been leading the pack of Linux distributions with the introduction of new virtualization features for many years now. This page provides a history of noteworthy milestones in Fedora's virtualization support.
Fedora Core 4: Glimpse of the future
- Released on June 13, 2005.
- A preview of Xen (2.x) virtualization as a set of add-on packages, released post-release.
Fedora Core 5: The future is now
- Released on March 20, 2006.
- First release to include Xen 3.0 virtualization for host and guest, as officially supported package.
- Installs of paravirtualized guests, with a text mode installer
- Early version of libvirt for managing Xen guests
Fedora Core 6: Virtualization grows up
- Released on October 24, 2006.
- Expanded Xen support including fully virtualized guests.
- Graphical framebuffer for paravirtualized guests
- Graphical installs of para & fully virtualized guests.
- Expanded libvirt APIs to allow monitoring of performance
- Debut of virt-manager tool for managing Xen guests locally with embedded graphical console
- The foundation of Xen support in RHEL-5
Fedora 7: The new kid on the block
Feature list
Other notable points
- Released on May 31, 2007.
- Continued support for Xen
- The introduction of KVM to native kernels for fullyvirtualized guests.
- libvirt gains a new hypervisor driver for managing QEMU and KVM guests.
- libvirt introduces 'virtual networking' capability providing 'out of the box' NAT based network connectivity for guests which plays nicely with NetworkManager.
Fedora 8: Protection from the bad guys
Feature list
Other notable points
- Released on November 8, 2007.
Fedora 9: Farewell to old friends
Feature list
- Xen fullyvirt direct kernel boot
- SASL authentication support
- PolicyKit authentication support
- Xen pv_ops DomU
Other notable points
- Released on May 13, 2008.
- Xen Dom0 support dropped, until Xen Dom0 pv-ops work is accepted by upstream kernel community
Fedora 10: Management at a distance
Feature list
- Virtual appliance building tools
- Remote deployment of virtualized guests
- Storage management in virtualization tools
Other notable points
- Released on November 25, 2008.
Fedora 11: The walled garden
Feature list
- PCI device assignment for KVM
- Merged QEMU and KVM RPMs
- sVirt confinement of virtual machines
- Improved VNC console handling
- SASL authentication for VNC
Other notable points
- Released on June 9, 2009.
Fedora 12: <witty tagline here>
Feature list
- Kernel SamePage Merging (KSM)
- KVM Huge Page Backed Memory
- KVM NIC Hotplug
- KVM qcow2 Performance
- KVM Stable Guest ABI
- libguestfs
- Virtual Network Interface Management
- Ovirt_Node
- Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV)
- Virt Privileges
- VirtgPXE
- VirtioSerial
- Virt Storage Management
Other notable points
- Due to be released on November 17, 2009.