2009-05-12 Compose & Stage Release Candidate (7 days)
Truly we are in the final countdown to the Fedora 11 release.
This coming Thursday (May 7th) we are holding a Fedora Test Day in an
attempt to fully test all aspects of Fedora's virtualization support.
More below details on how to join in the test day.
Virt Test Day
=============
On May 7th, the Fedora 11 Virtualization Test Day will take place on
#fedora-qa (
irc.freenode.net).
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-April/msg00287.html
Please join us for the day on #fedora-qa (
irc.freenode.net) to help
with testing Fedora's virt tools, writing test cases, filing bugs and
debugging issues.
On the day, you'll have the opportunity to work closely with other
Fedora developers and contributors to make a real impact on the
quality of Fedora's virtualization features.
In advance of the test day, a wiki page is being prepared listing the
various areas which will be tested on the day and individual test
cases for each of the test areas:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-05-07_Virtualization
Currently, the Xen DomU test area has the most comprehensive set of
test cases, but hopefully folks won't be long rectifying that!
Fedora 12
=========
F12 tracker bugs have been created. See the wiki page for more
details:
https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?title=Virtualization_bugs
The F12 blocker and target bugs depend on the F11 counterparts. The
idea is that if we don't fix a bug in F11, it's automatically on the
F12 tracker but we still have a list of bugs worth fixing in a post-GA
F11 update.
Also, dist-f12 now has builds of kvm-85 and libvirt-0.6.3. As soon as
the F11 release has been composed, rawhide will switch to being
composed from dist-f12 and these packages will appear in rawhide.
FWN
===
Dale Bewley has contributed two more excellent virtualization sections
to Fedora Weekly News:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue174#Virtualization
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue173#Virtualization
Schroedinger's VM
=================
Jerry James experienced the same confusion many other people must have
had when he went away leaving his kernel compile running in a VM and
came back to find it wouldn't progress unless we was actually watching
the VM window:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-April/msg00207.html
Is this expected? Do KVM-based VMs have to be looked at to do
anything? If so, is there an option somewhere along the lines of
RunEvenWhenIAmNotLookingAtYou=true?
A much more rational explanation was forthcoming :-)
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-April/msg00212.html
When using the SDL backend (i.e. instead of qemu-kvm -vnc), if you
switch workspaces using Ctrl-Alt-Arrow, then SDL tries to grab the
pointer and fails and keeps retrying until you switch back to the
workspace.
Fully gory details, here:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/480065
libguestfs
==========
Rich Jones continued his progress with libguestfs and released version
1.0.0 followed by several more release. He also posted a number of
interesting guestfish recipes, demonstrating the power of libguestfs:
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/libguestfs/recipes.html
Dom0 Kernels
============
Michael Young posted some updated Dom0 kernel builds:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-April/msg00243.html
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-May/msg00016.html
Dan Berrange reported some success testing these kernels under Xen in
a KVM guest.
Bugs
====
DOOM-O-METER: 178 bugs open two weeks ago, 182 this week.
Blockers:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/496298
F11 Beta :: under KVM anaconda detect cdrom media because udev
doesn't probe for filesystem type
Further progress was made on figuring out why anaconda fails to
install packages from DVD media on KVM. The difference from
baremetal turns out to be that qemu doesn't implement
GPCMD_READ_DISC_INFO.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/493692
Creating new VM; SELinux prevents opening iso image of install
media
When starting a VM, sVirt re-labels a disk image with the
svirt_image_t:MCS label so that only that VM may access the
image. However, we weren't doing this for readonly images like
ISOs. Dan Berrange and Dan Walsh worked together to come up with a
patch to fix this - readonly images will now be re-labelled
virt_content_t:s0 when the VM is started.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/497602
Virtualization group doesn't pull in qemu or kvm
When the qemu package was split, we decided to have the
Virtualization package group install qemu-kvm via a Provides on
the qemu-system-x86 package. It turns out that yum groupinstall
will only install packages, not rpm provides. To fix this, it was
decided to make qemu-kvm a meta-package requiring the
qemu-system-x86 package.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/497429
pwritev writes ramdom junk
Very serious data corruptor which thankfully only affects latest
development qemu upstream. Jakub already has a fix.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/492838
kvm: PTHREAD_PRIO_INHERIT mutexes fail to unlock sometimes
(canberra-gtk-play crash locks desktop metacity bugbuddy)
An odd issue whereby PTHREAD_PRIO_INHERIT mutexs fail to unlock on
i386 KVM guests. Manifests itself as pulseaudio related desktop
app segfaults.
qemu:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/496642
qemu qcow2 image corruption
Gleb pointed out another qcow2 corruption fix upstream and this
was also included for F11.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/498405
qemu disk image corruption with qcow2/virtio
QCOW2 image corruption seen with latest Fedora 11 and
virtio-blk. Also reproducible with the latest upstream qemu-kvm
stable branch.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/497170
qemu segfaults with "raw_aio_remove: aio request not found!"
Rich Jones discovered a qemu-kvm segv when using read-only
images. Patches have been identified upstream and ported to the
stable branch. We'll pull them into an F12 update in due course.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/498242
QEMU should set CLONE_IO flag when creating any threads
Dan Berrange suggests that qemu should use CLONE_IO for each of
its threads so that all qemu threads share the same I/O priority
so that ionice can be used with qemu.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/497341
Make the /dev/kvm device world accessible to all users by default
After some discussion with the KVM maintainers, we've concluded
that we should make /dev/kvm world accessible by default in F12.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/496627
qemu-kvm es1370 sound card emulation segfault
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/495964
qemu locks up at shutdown with sdl audio driver
Debugging issues with qemu's various sound backends continues. It
looks like the pulseaudio backend might work better for people.
libvirt:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/460649
libvirtd requires restart in order to detect new capabilities like
KVM support
Cole has come up with a patch to have libvirtd automatically
detect if qemu-kvm is installed. Hopefully we'll have this patch
in before the F12 release.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/474182
LVs created in an existing VG have wrong SELinux label
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/497131
svirt fails to relabel qcow2 backing files
sVirt re-labels images before it starts a guest, but it doesn't
re-label qcow2 backing files.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/496945
libvirt should own /var/cache/libvirt in spec file
libvirt not owning this directory causes it to be mislabelled
which, in turn, causes virDomainPeek() to fail.
virtinst:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/496340
Creating guests where the .iso image is on a NFS share doesn't
work anymore
Much discussion on the what svirt needs to do to support images on
NFS shares.
Cole resolved this by only warning if selinux labeling appears to
be wrong.
grub:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/479760
[PATCH] add support for virtio_blk devices to grub-install
Jan ONDREJ came across this problem when testing the preview
release and prompted Peter Jones to commit this patch.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/498416
Unable to boot Fedora11-Preview
Jan also reports that on his F10 system, with F11 virt packages,
he could boot a newly installed F11 Beta guest but not an F11
Preview guest. It looks most likely to be a grub issue, but this
has not been reported on an F10 host yet.
etherboot:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/498230
virtio PXE Roms "No IP address"
Another report of etherboot PXE ROMs failing, but this time it
seems that virtio is failing as well as e1000.
xen:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/493103
Network periodically hangs during install of xen guest
This problem has magically been resolved.