Fedora 12 Release =================
Yay! Fedora 12 was released on Tuesday:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_12_Announcement
Thanks to all who help get this release out!
There was a single response to my call for a "witty tagline" for Fedora 12, so I went with Avi's "Dirty Dozen" suggestion - it's Fedora *12* and we have *12* virt features listed so ... :-)
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Virtualization/History#Fedora_12:_The_Dirty_D...
Note also that the marketing folks have posted an interview with some of the Fedora virt developers here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Virtualization_improvements_in_Fedora_12
Fedora 12 includes a number of improvements in the field of Virtualization. New tools enable system administrators to perform nearly impossible - until now - tasks easily. Imagine re-configuring a virtual machine off-line, add new hardware to VM with out restarting it, migrate to another host without restarting the VMs and many other exotic features. Let's hear what developers have to say about those wonderful new options.
virt-preview ============
Justin Forbes announced the availability of a virt-preview repository for Fedora 12 users:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-November/msg00041.html
A couple of improvements have been made this time around. Namely packages are build with mock instead of koji so that new packages can be used a BuildRequires for other new packages. Also new builds are triggered by successful koji builds of tracked packages against dist-rawhide, so the process is a bit more automated.
These improvements should make virt-preview a hell of a lot more useful and manageable. Kudos Justin!
Release Blockers ================
As with any release, we went through a couple of fire-drills with last-minute serious blocker bugs:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/526549 rawhide/i386 kvm host corrupts data of guests https://bugzilla.redhat.com/533063 preadv()/pwritev() prototypes are broken on i386 with -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64
KVM guests on 32 bit hosts were seeing data corruption in some circumstances. After huge efforts from Justin Forbes, James Laska and Milan Broz to get the issue narrowed down to qemu, yours truly bisected it to the introduction of preadv/pwritev support.
I happened to be sitting around a table with Dan Berrange, Chris Wright, Stephen Tweedie, Herbert Xu and Dor Laor at the time and all chipped in helping to figure out the issue. Eventually, danpb found the issue with glibc's preadv()/pwritev() prototypes in its headers and a simple fix sorted the issue out just in time for the release.
Now there's a team effort!
Another saga was going on in parallel on the VT-d front:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/524808 swiotlb should be enabled when VT-d setup fails
This got recognized as a critical issue very late in the release as it was realized that there are plenty of users who will have VT-d enabled in the BIOS, certain broken BIOSes and >4Gb memory (including swap).
In the end dwmw2's patch was included and tested by multiple people, so intel_iommu=on is still the default in Fedora 12.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/533952 DMAR: kernel panic with 2.6.31.5-127.fc12.i686
But then this issue came to prominence post-release, and it turns out the fix for bug #524808 broke those machines with fault BIOSes and <4Gb of RAM. Sometimes you just can't win!
Lots of folks have been battling away at these bugs including David Woodhouse, Chris Wright, Adam Williamson and a whole bunch of others.
Mount guest filesystems in the host ===================================
Rich Jones continues rocking with yet another cool feature:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-November/msg00001.html
We just built a package called 'libguestfs-mount' in Rawhide which lets you mount virtual machines' filesystems on the host, using FUSE.
Rich may have announced this very quietly, but sit up and take note - this is damn useful!
Bugs ====
DOOM-O-METER: 186 bugs open three weeks ago, only 173 now!
== Ongoing ==
=== kernel ===
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/532009 "kvm_run: failed entry, reason 7" when running guest with F11 LiveCD
Looks like an issue starting a guest on a F11 AMD host.
=== qemu ====
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/539365 qemu's system_powerdown doesn't work with Windows XP
Now that virtinst enables acpi for XP guests, we're noticing that 'virsh shutdown' has no effect on them. That may be just due to a lack of ACPI support in the guest.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/id=538047 Any use of QEMU's vvfat driver always abort()s the whole process
Dan Berrange discovered this nasty hack which causes glibc to abort qemu.
=== libvirt ===
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/537938 restore fails with large files; libvirtd becomes unresponsive
Charles Duffy reported this issue and proposed a fix. Apparently this isn't needed upstream anymore, but we may still need it for F-12.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/532654 virsh save hangs in Fedora12 rawhide
SELinux related issues breaking save/restore.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/536760 SELinux is preventing /usr/bin/qemu-kvm "write" access on sr0
It looks like we're getting AVCs because qemu is trying to open read-only images for writing.
=== python-virtinst ===
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/492082 python-virtinst: add a label to newly created disks?
This has come back full circle again. Now that the anaconda guys have refused to do anything about it, our only option is to figure out some way of labelling the disk before starting the guest.
=== virt-manager ===
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/532216 virt-manager should disable unimplemented reboot option for qemu/kvm
libvirt doesn't implement reboot for KVM (#496537), yet the button is still available in virt-manager.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/537221 virt-manager: URL install should prompt to change scratchdir perms
virt-manager is downloading kernel and initrds to the users home directory where qemu cannot read them. Proposal is that virt-manager should prompt to change the ACLs on this dir like it does for ISOs.
== Resolved ==
=== kernel ===
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/532215 KSM bad_page() issue preventing VM startup
Justin Forbes has cherry-picked a fix from upsteam into the kernel in updates.
=== qemu ===
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/539583 qemu use-after-free crash in slirp/m_free()
A couple of days after the F-12 release, we get a report of a very obvious crasher in qemu 0.11.0's slirp code. One really does wonder how these things get unnoticed until after the release :-)
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/533573 qemu-img convert can't handle parallels images above 4GiB
David Woodhouse sent a patch upstream to fix this.
=== xen ===
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/521800 kernel backtrace: possible recursive locking detected on Xen domU
Apparently this problem just disappeared with a recent 2.6.31 kernel.
-
Mark McLoughlin