Poor performace for e1000 and other fully virtualized netcard
by Ján ONDREJ (SAL)
Hello,
today I disovered, that e1000 cards has very poor performance in Fedora 18
and 19. Does not matter, if guest is an Linux or other system.
By "poor" I mean TCP network transfers about 5-90 kB/s, even if they are on
an gigabit network.
By downgrading kernel on Fedora 19 from 3.10.X to
kernel-3.9.5-301.fc19.x86_64 fixed my problem, so looks like there
is an bug in kernel. I tested these kernels:
Fast:
kernel-3.9.5-301.fc19.x86_64
Slow:
kernel-3.10.7-100.fc18.x86_64
kernel-3.10.9-100.fc18.x86_64
kernel-3.10.10-200.fc19.x86_64
Looks like it is an change with kernel-3.10.X. I can test other kernels if
requested.
For me, it's easy to reproduce. Tested on 4 host machines, 2 Fedoras,
multiple kernels and different guests. Also tested some network cards,
e1000, pcnet, ... All with similar problems.
As described in other bug, virtio net driver has time skew problems, so
I can't use it. :-(
Any ideas, how to solve this problem?
Regards
SAL
10 years, 7 months
libguestfs on PPC64
by Richard W.M. Jones
[Note I'm not bothering with 32 bit ppc any more since it is
effectively obsolete.]
Libguestfs now works on ppc64 using the 'direct' backend. You will
need:
- libguestfs 1.23.21 + 7f90aa0998
- supermin 4.1.x (only tested with supermin-4.1.5-2.fc21.ppc64, but
earlier versions should work)
- qemu-system-ppc64 compiled from git (qemu 1.4 & 1.6 known to be broken)
- kernel-3.10.10-200.fc19.ppc64, earlier versions should work
- real ppc64 hardware
There are multiple bugs which stop you installing Fedora/ppc64 on
qemu-system-ppc64 running on x86-64.
Since Fedora 19 has dropped support for PR KVM, and since the Apple G5
I use for testing does not support real HV KVM, I could not test this
using KVM, only using TCG.
Next steps are:
- run the full test suite and fix any problems (in progress)
- get it working with the libvirt backend
All features should be fully supported except the UML backend won't
work (limitation of UML).
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
Fedora now supports 80 OCaml packages (the OPEN alternative to F#)
10 years, 7 months
libguestfs on ARM
by Richard W.M. Jones
libguestfs now has experimental support for 32-bit ARM, including KVM
on ARM. You will need at least the following to make it all work:
- libguestfs 1.23.21 + 6e498461f6
Use ./configure --with-default-backend=direct. The libvirt backend
does not work (yet).
- supermin 4.1.5 + a55d9cf157
- kernel that supports virtio-mmio, virtio-scsi, virtio-serial
Note that the Fedora 20 kernel has missing virtio-serial support
(RHBZ#1005551) so you have to compile your own appliance kernel.
- qemu 1.6.0 or from git
To use KVM:
- Cortex-A15 hardware that boots into Hyp mode
- host kernel >= 3.11 with LPAE + KVM support
(You can also use regular ARM hardware w/o KVM support, or qemu.)
If you need different host and appliance kernels, then set
SUPERMIN_KERNEL to point to the appliance vmlinuz and SUPERMIN_DTB to
point to the device tree file called 'vexpress-v2p-ca9.dtb'. If host
kernel == appliance kernel (as on x86), then you shouldn't need to set
any environment variables.
It's expected that some tests in the libguestfs test suite will fail.
I'm working on fixing those. However the majority should run fine, as
should 'make quickcheck' (ie. libguestfs-test-tool) -- if
libguestfs-test-tool doesn't work then you're missing some dependency
above.
I'm also working on making the libvirt backend work.
The UML backend does not work on ARM (this is a limitation of UML).
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines. Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into KVM guests.
http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v
10 years, 7 months
Fedora/RHEL virt packages version
by Eric Viseur
Hi,
I'm currently working on a virtualization-based security project whose aim
is to be Common Criteria-certified in its final version.
What we did was start working with Fedora 18, which should be the basis for
RHEL 7. However, it turns out having more recent versions of the
KVM-related packages (qemu and libvirt, namely) could be a good help as it
would allow us to use vfio.
In my understanding, vfio isn't available with the qemu version used on F18.
So here is my question : will RHEL7 stictly stick to the F18 packages
versions or will it use more up-to-date version ?
Regards,
Eric Viseur
Etudiant Ingénieur Civil Electricien
LinkedIn Profile<http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=193442069&trk=tab_pro>
10 years, 7 months
Fedora virt status August 2013
by Cole Robinson
Hi all, here are some Fedora virt status bits for August.
Fedora 20
=========
The big news for Fedora 20 is that ARM is on its way to becoming a
primary architecture:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/ARM_as_Primary
http://lwn.net/Articles/559502/
The schedule has slipped a couple weeks, due to quite a few FTBFS
errors, and some fallout from adding ARM builders to the koji pool.
Here's the remaining schedule:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/20/Schedule
Sep 03: Alpha deadline
Sep 17: Alpha release
Oct 08: Beta deadline
Oct 22: Beta release
Nov 26: GA release
The three virt 'changes' for F20 are still on track:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Virt_ACLs
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Virt_Manager_Snapshots
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Virt_ARM_on_x86
The latter two are testable in F20 at the moment but are still a bit
rough around the edges, watch those pages for updates.
I've requested a date for the F20 virt test day to be in the beginning
of October. I'll update the list when the details are finalized.
QEMU 1.6
========
QEMU 1.6 was released on August 15th, 2013. Changelog highlights:
- Support for live migration over RDMA
- TCG target for aarch64.
- Support for auto-convergence in live migration ("CPU stunning")
- The XHCI (USB 3.0) controller supports live migration.
- New device "nvme" provides a PCI device that implements the NVMe standard.
- ACPI hotplug of devices behind a PCI bridge is supported
A more detailed changelog is at:
http://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/1.6
QEMU 1.6 will be the basis for what is shipped in Fedora 20.
Bug stats
=========
Bug count on Aug 1 2013 : 218
Total bugs today : 211
Two months in a row with a reduction, hooray! :) But I'm sure that
will change this following month with the impending F20 alpha.
By release:
* Fedora 18 : 75
* Fedora 19 : 104
* Fedora 20 : 1
* Fedora rawhide : 31
By package:
* bochs : 1
* edk2 : 2
* gnome-boxes : 33
* ipxe : 3
* libguestfs : 8
* libosinfo : 7
* libvirt : 33
* libvirt-sandbox : 23
* netcf : 7
* qemu : 39
* seabios : 1
* spice-gtk : 2
* usbredir : 1
* virt-dmesg : 1
* virt-manager : 16
* virt-viewer : 8
* virt-what : 3
* virtio-win : 3
* xen : 6
* xorg-x11-drv-cirrus: 2
* xorg-x11-drv-qxl : 12
By status:
* ASSIGNED : 18
* NEW : 173
* ON_QA : 2
* POST : 18
Bugs of note
============
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1003162
Certain QMP calls are crashing qemu on i686 in rawhide/f20. I think
this results in libvirt not working too well :/ , but there's a patch
upstream.
Thanks,
Cole
10 years, 7 months
