F-12 Features

23 Jun 2009


      F-12 Schedule
=============
Phew, Fedora 11 has just been released and Fedora 12 is already coming
at us hard:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/12/Schedule
2009-07-28 Feature Freeze (36 days)
  2009-09-22 Beta (Final Development) Free (92 days)
  2009-10-20 Final Release Compose (120 days)
F-12 Features
=============
We've prepared a good bunch of feature pages so far for F-12:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:F12_Virt_Features
In the kernel related space we have:
- SR-IOV
  - KSM
  - Huge pages
For QEMU, we have:
- Stable PCI Addresses
  - Stable Guest ABI
  - KVM NIC hotplug
  - VNC resource tunnel
In the libvirt space we have:
- VirtPrivileges
  - VirtAuthorization
  - Host network interface APIs
  - Storage management APIs
  - TCK
General virt tools related features include:
- Hostinfo
  - VirtAppliances
Also, of note is the feature describing NetworkManager's forthcoming
support for bridged networking:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/NetworkManagerBridging
Please do jump in and give help or feedback where you can!
F-12 Release Engineering
========================
Some of the Fedora release engineering folks held a Fedora Activity
Day (FAD) at Red Hat's offices in Raleigh recently:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Activity_Day_Fedora_Development_Cycle_2...
They came away from the meeting with a bunch of proposals intended to
improve the Fedora development process:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Milestone_Adjustment_Proposal
What was called the Preview release is now called Beta, what was
    Beta is now called Alpha and what was called Alpha is no more.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Israwhidebroken.com_Proposal
The goal is to have a place where people can go to find the "last
    known good" rawhide tree.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Koji_Build_Autosign_Proposal
All packages coming from Koji will be signed - i.e. rawhide
    packages will be signed.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Critical_Path_Packages_Proposal
A core set of packages will receive special attention when they
    are being updated to try and reduce the chance of major
    regressions.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/No_Frozen_Rawhide_Proposal
Rawhide will no longer freeze when we hit the Beta Freeze, instead
    rawhide will continue to be published from the devel/ CVS branch
    and there will be new install trees immediately available for the
    new CVS branch (e.g. the F-12/ branch).
Fedora Community Portal
=======================
A new web interface for Fedora community members is no available:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/community/
Fedora Community provides a window into the Fedora distribution,
  leveraging the power of Fedora's Account System, Bodhi, Bugzilla,
  Koji, and PackageDB into a single user-friendly website.
  ...
  Fedora Community is designed to simplify Fedora workflows and bring
  transparency to Fedora processes.
qemu-0.11
=========
Anthony Liguori posted his plans for QEMU's 0.11 release:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2009-06/msg01575.html
0.10.0 was released on March 2nd so following with the 6 month
  release cycle, that would put 0.11.0 at September 2nd.
Based on the experiences with the stable releases, here's what I'd
  recommend:
o On July 15th, fork master -> stable-0.11
    o Change version to 0.10.90
    o Release qemu-0.11.0-rc1
    o Release additional -rcN releases every 1-2 weeks
    o Introduce a new maintainer for stable-0.10 (via git pulls)
    o At least 1 week before release, hopefully we'll have the final
      -rcN that we can then declare 0.11.0.
Avi confirmed that he plans to mirror these releases with matching
qemu-kvm releases.
For Fedora 12, we already have a 0.11 snapshot (0.10.50-6.kvm86.fc12)
and as new snapshots become available we will pull them in. This means
we should have a feature frozen qemu in time for the F-12 feature
freeze and a final 0.11 release in time for the final F-12 freeze.
libguestfs
==========
Rich Jones continues rocking with his libguestfs working, with a whole
load of interesting stuff on the fedora-virt list and his blog.
Rich always does his best to assure us that he really is crazy, but
his libguestfs "supermin appliance" work takes the biscuit:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-June/msg00118.html
The supermin appliance removes the kernel and all the executable
  libraries and programs from the appliance.  That just leaves a
  skeleton of config files and some data files, which is obviously
  massively smaller than the normal appliance.  At runtime we rebuild
  the appliance on-the-fly from the libraries and programs on the host
  (eg. pulling in the real /lib/libc.so, the real /bin/bash etc.)
The new appliance is a mere 500K, so libguestfs RPMs will be a lot
  smaller.
libosinfo
=========
Cole Robinson posted an RFC detailing his plans to create a libosinfo
library replacing python-virtinst's OS_TYPES dictionary which contains
valuable information on the preferred configuration for different
guest OSes:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-June/msg00100.html
I've done the initial work for a new library, libosinfo (better name
  recommendations appreciated). This library will provide OS meta data
  for use in virt applications, replacing the dictionary we currently
  keep in virtinst.
FWN
===
Another couple of Fedora Weekly News virt roundups from Dale Bewley:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue179#Virtualization
  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue180#Virtualization
Xen
===
Gerd is planning on pushing a xen-3.4.0 update to F-11:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-June/msg00032.html
Not yet.  I wanna give it a bit more testing in rawhide.  Also it
   looks like xensource wants to release 3.4.1 quickly to fix a bunch
   of important bugs.  I think it is a good idea to wait until that
   one is out, then update F11 straight to xen-3.4.1.
Also xen 3.4 bumps the shared library major for some libraries from
   3.2 to 3.4, so I'll have to figure what breaks due to that and
   coordinate the update.  I know xenner is affected.  Libvirts seems
   to do fine as it needs libxenstore only which is still at 3.0.
   Didn't investigate yet what else might need a rebuild.
Also, Michael Young continues to push new Dom0 kernel builds:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-June/msg00097.html
Unfortunately, Dom0 seems to have missed the 2.6.31 boat, so Dom0
support in Fedora 12 looks highly unlikely.
Bugs
====
= New Bugs =
== kvm ==
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/504376
    F-11 guest takes 45 minutes in mke2fs for 8gb fs on virtio disk
    with a sparse backing file
A report of mke2fs taking forever during an anaconda install of an
    F-11 guest when using a virtio disk with a sparse backed
    file. Apparently, SLES-11 doesn't appear to suffer from the
    problem.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/505695
    Poor KVM guest performance doing kernel builds (100+% overhead, w/
    8vcpu and virtio)
Another report from Erik highlighting performance problems with
    KVM and disk I/O.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/507500
    "MAX_LOCK_DEPTH too low!" warning during kvm guest startup
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/507535
    GPF in nf_conntrack_alloc() with KVM guests (2.6.31)
An oops in core networking code as a result of routing packets
    back and forth between two guests.
== qemu ==
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/506170
    removing virtualization packages leaves qemu-system-x86
'yum groupinstall Virtualization' installs qemu-system-x86 via the
    qemu-kvm meta-package, but 'yum groupremove Virtualization' only
    removes qemu-kvm. Looks like expected behaviour for yum.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/507626
    qemu-kvm VNC :: major display tearing garbage with windows guest
    and scrolling windows
This looks like a similar issue to xterm getting garbled in a
    Fedora guest (bug #503156)
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/506585
    qemu-nbd dies with 'nbd.c:nbd_receive_request():L465: read failed'
Looks like qemu-nbd dies when a client closes its end.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/505109
    qemu ppc/ppc64 boot says "Boot failure! No secondary bootloader
    specified"
Yet another bug with the ppc target. This time only in rawhide.
== libvirt ==
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/507271
    libvirt always places IDE disks before virtio/scsi disks
If you attach an IDE disk to a guest booting from a virtio disk,
    libvirt ends up sorting the disks such that the guest will try and
    boot from the IDE disk.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/468384
    RFE: use virt-manager to create network bridges
A bugzilla basically requesting the 'Shared Network Interface'
    F-12 feature.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/505625
    libvirtd segfault during virsh dominfo on security model
'virsh dominfo' was causing libvirtd to segfault because the
    selinux was blown away by virGetCapabilities(). Fixed upstream,
    needs to be pulled into F-11.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/506590
    libvirt should ignore NUMA cells with missing topology
It turns out some NUMA cells can be missing topology information,
    and libvirt should ignore these. Dan has come up with a patch
    which works well for the reporter.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/507405
    virsh: renaming of guests creates a copy
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/507555
    libvirt starting a guest with ISO on NFS mount fails when
    unnecessarily setting SELinux file context
Tim Waugh supplied a patch for this one.
== svirt ==
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/506250
    svirt prevents symlinks to be used in disk image paths
If any part of a disk image path is a symlink, svirt denies qemu
    access to it. This will be fixed in a selinux-policy update soon.
== virtinst ==
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/504604
    virtinst ignores VirtualDisk(sparse = False) and doesn't
    pre-allocate the disk image
Pre-allocation of disk images was disabled until it could be done
    without blocking libvirtd. This was fixed in libvirt-0.6.3, so to
    enable nonsparse disks in F-11 we would need to first backport the
    change from 0.6.3.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/505317
    virtinst: make SLES11 guests use virtio by default
Looks like SLES11 guests work well with virtio, should make
    virtinst enable it by default.
== virt-manager ==
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/504605
    virt-manager gets sparse/nosparse mixed up in New VM dialog
virt-manager currently gets confused between sparse/nonsparse. Not
    that it matters since virtinst currently ignores it.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/504326
    virt-manager's new VM dialog does not use storage pool interface
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/502204
    virt-manager's dialog to connect an existing CD-ROM to an ISO does
    not use storage pool interface
A couple of places where we should be using the storage poll
    interface in virt-manager. Cole has now fixed these upstream.
== virt-mem ==
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/505072
    virt-mem "invalid argument in virDomainLookupByUUIDString" error
A known error with the virt-mem tools on F-11, Rich has a patch
    somewhere.
= Resolved Bugs =
== qemu ==
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/506435
    kvm: -kernel option seems broken
Re-basing our qemu-roms-more-room.patch onto 0.10.5 introduced this
    regression. Fixed in qemu-0.10.5-3.fc11
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499060
    vgabios regression - 1440x900 resolution no longer available
Glauber has cherry-picked the code to fix this from 0.6c and
    pushed a vgabios-0.6b-2.fc11 update to F-11.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/501545
    "qemu-kvm -vga std" broken with vgabios 0.6c
Tom London bisected the problem down to a specific upstream
    commit. It turns out the qemu is missing some code (which is in
    latest boch, but not qemu) in order for 0.6c to work. We've
    reverted to 0.6b (with some changes cherry-picked from 0.6c) in
    F-12 for now.
== kvm ==
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/504374
    kvm: hw DR_* watchpoint registers are ignored
KVM in 2.6.29 does not virtualization the x86 debug registers so
    GDB watchpoints do not work. However, this is implemented in
    2.6.30.
== etherboot ==
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/506616
    [qemu netboot] Eliminate 3 second delay on PXE boot
Request to simply rebuild etherboot with ASK_BOOT=-1 in order to
    eliminate a pointless 3 second delay that most people don't ever
    see.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/507391
    qemu-kvm PXE boot with e1000 results in bogus packets
Several people have reported PXE using a virtio NIC doesn't work
    in F-11. It turned out to be an issue with gcc re-ordering writes
    and was fixed simply by appropriately using the 'volatile' keyword
    for the packet header. Fix available in etherboot-5.4.4-16.fc11
== svirt ==
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499259
    svirt denials breaks KVM PCI device assignment
The virt_manage_sysfs SELinux boolean was added quite some time
    ago which is enough to use PCI device assignment with SELinux in
    enforcing mode.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/504444
    svirt denials break USB device passthrough
Similar to bug #499259 where svirt breaks PCI passthrough, svirt
    is denying qemu access to /proc, breaking USB passthrough. Dan
    Walsh has added a virt_use_usb boolean to selinux-policy which, if
    enabled, fixes the problem.
== libvirt ==
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/506737
    virt-manager should allow VM names with spaces in them
Apparently this is a 'feature', so WONTFIX.
== virtinst ==
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/484099
    virt-install SASL authentication support
virt-install doesn't currently have support for authenticating
    using SASL. Cole has fixed this upstream now.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/506319
    virtinst errors finding default bridge: upsets virt-manager
Cole fixed this upstream.
= Ongoing Bugs =
== qemu ==
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/473154
    Virtual machine fails to start without cdom - qemu: could not open
    disk image /dev/sr0
Eduardo has posted a variant of Cole's patch upstream; Anthony has
    requested further changes.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/501131
    qemu segfault when VNC client disconnects
Gerd has fixed this upstream, just need to back-port the patch to
    F-11 now.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/504273
    qemu-system-ppc on ppc host fails with "no opcode defined"
It looks like this bug should be fixed by a change upstream to
    disable gcc optimizations for translate.c. Pavel still sees
    "invalid opcode" errors, though. A qemu-0.10.5-3.fc11 update has
    been pushed which might help.
== virt-manager ==
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/503784
    memory/vcpus changes in virt-manager do not persist across
    libvirtd restart
Erik Jacobson points out that this issue affects CPU changes as
    well as memory. virt-manager needs to explicitly make these config
    changes persistent.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/503786
    virt-manager refuses to increase guest memory until max memory
    change is first applied
Cole has fixed this upstream.
== koan ==
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/493414
    Windows installs require manual reboot in the middle
koan needs to acquire the ability to re-start a guest once the
    first stage of the install has completed.

Fedora virt status

F-12 Features

F-12 Features