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.
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Mark McLoughlin