[fedora-virt] Fedora virt status for October + November 2012

Tue Dec 4 00:29:01 UTC 2012

Since I missed October, here's a double dose of Fedora virt status bits
covering the past 2 months.

  Fedora 18 Beta release
  ======================

The Fedora 18 Beta was finally released last Tuesday, November 27:

https://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_18_beta_release_notes

This came after yet more delays, bringing the total to 8 weeks. The blocking
issues are mostly fallout from the new installer UI, and creation of a new
tool fedup to replace preupgrade for stable release upgrades. The current F18
schedule:

2012-12-18  Final change deadline
2013-01-08  Fedora 18 GA

No word yet if all this will affect the Fedora 19 schedule.

Despite the delays, libvirt and qemu have not been rebased for F18, sticking
with 0.10.2.* and 1.2.* respectively.

  Fedora 18 Virt Test Day results
  ===============================

The Fedora 18 Virt Test Day went quite well! We had 10 users report results in
the wiki, at least a couple others running through the test cases on IRC, and
a handful more active in IRC with other virt problems/questions. You can see
the reported results here:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2012-11-01_Virtualization

While those contributor numbers aren't too high when compared to, say, the
Graphics Test Day (30+ for the Intel day), they are still good considering
that testing virt doesn't lend itself to a quick test with a livecd. I
estimate that the whole process generated 12-15 bug reports, if you count
issues filed while the test cases were being written :)

  Libvirt 1.0.0 release
  ===================

Libvirt finally went 1.0! The version number change is similar to QEMU 1.0 and
Linux 3.0 before it, in that it wasn't motivated by any particular feature or
major development, but a desire to the version bump over with :). Particularly
for libvirt there wasn't a soname bump or API break of any kind.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvirt-announce/2012-November/msg00000.html

The highlights:

- virNodeGetCPUMap: Define public API
- Add systemd journal support
- Add a qemu capabilities cache manager
- USB migration support
- various improvement and fixes when using QMP QEmu interface

Additionally there were several libvirt maintenance releases: 0.9.6.3 for F16,
0.9.11.6 and 0.9.11.7 for F17, and 0.10.2.1 for F18. All should be available
in the stable repos.

  QEMU/KVM packaging enablement for other architectures
  =====================================================

Paolo did quite a bit of refactoring of the Fedora 'qemu' packaging which
enabled all the qemu-user and qemu-system-* architectures that we were not
building: alpha, microblaze, s390x, lm32, or32, xtensa, and unicore32.

Also, Rich and Paolo worked to get seabios building using the GCC x86 cross
compiler, which gives us a working seabios on PPC hosts. This is needed for
anyone that wants to create x86 QEMU virtual machines on a PPC machine.

Kudos to Paolo and Rich for their excellent work!

  UEFI for QEMU/KVM using OVMF
  ============================

Laszlo Ersek wrote up a wiki page about enabling UEFI for QEMU/KVM virtual
machines, using OVMF (Open Virtual Machine Firmware):

http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/OVMF

There has been some offline discussion about packaging OVMF for Fedora, but a
critical part of the OVMF code (FAT filesystem driver) has a licensing
restriction that isn't compatible with Fedora's guidelines. Pending a
permanent solution, Laszlo has provided RPMs for any enterprising users who
would like to play with things:

http://people.redhat.com/~lersek/ovmf_pkg/

  Bug stats
  =========

Bug count on Oct 01 2012: 228
Bug count on Dec 04 2012: 252

Eeek, pretty sizeable jump. There's been a large influx of bug reports during
November, almost all against Fedora 18. There's definitely some
CLOSED->CURRENTRELEASE and CLOSED->DUPLICATE candidates that need some easy
cleanup, but also a quite a few legit reports that need some attention.

By release:
    * Fedora 16          : 47
    * Fedora 17          : 108
    * Fedora 18          : 71
    * Fedora rawhide     : 26

By package:
    * gnome-boxes        : 11
    * gtk-vnc            : 2
    * ipxe               : 2
    * libguestfs         : 1
    * libosinfo          : 8
    * libseccomp         : 1
    * libvirt            : 49
    * libvirt-cim        : 3
    * libvirt-glib       : 2
    * libvirt-qmf        : 1
    * libvirt-sandbox    : 5
    * netcf              : 3
    * python-virtinst    : 4
    * qemu               : 78
    * spice-gtk          : 5
    * usbredir           : 1
    * virt-dmesg         : 1
    * virt-manager       : 23
    * virt-v2v           : 4
    * virt-viewer        : 10
    * virt-what          : 2
    * xen                : 18
    * xorg-x11-drv-cirrus: 2
    * xorg-x11-drv-qxl   : 16

  Bugs of notes
  =============

* X server crash if using latest F18 QXL
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=879535

Seems to have affected a couple XFCE users. This is specific to
xorg-x11-drv-qxl-0.1.0-1.fc18, so downgrading should solve the problem.

Thanks,
Cole