2009-03-03 Feature freeze (25 days) 2009-03-10 Beta Freeze (32 days) 2009-04-14 Final freeze (67 days)
F11 Alpha, Take 3 =================
The weird anaconda blocker which caused hang while moving to the timezone screen was never figured out, but it turns out that later rawhide didn't have this bug. Truly bizarre:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/482907
Because of this, rel-eng froze Alpha for the third time. After that things got even more messy and even more confusing:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01844.html
Another blocker cropped up, this time VNC installs failing:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/483399
In the end, after a mere two day slip, the installer gods were appeased and Fedora 11 Alpha (blink) shipped to an eagerly waiting public:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-February/msg00004.h...
On the virt side, the "disable kvmclock on machines with unsync TSC" workaround ended up making it in at the last minute:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/475598
Unfortunately, what looks like a pvmmu bug didn't get fixed in time:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/480822
This causes some guest installs on an F11 Alpha host to oops during heavy network activity.
FWN ===
Another edition of FWN, and another excellent virt section:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue161#Virtualization
Thanks to Dale Bewley.
F11 Release Notes =================
Dale Bewley has begun work on the F11 release notes:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Documentation_Virtualization_Beat
The "Unified Kernel Image" section provided some minior confusion on the fedora-virt list:
'The kernel package in Fedora 11 supports booting as a guest domU, but will not function as a dom0 until such support is provided upstream. The most recent Fedora release with dom0 support is Fedora 8.'
To which one user responded:
As I write this, I am running F10 on a hardware virt enabled machine ... and have installed F10 and other distros as guests. Hence, the statement above is unclear to me for F10 is running as both dom0 and domU.
Am I not reading something right?
The confusion here is that folks use the terms "dom0" and domU to refer to Xen, whereas the user in question is actually running KVM. The equivalent terms for KVM tend to just be "KVM host" and "KVM guest".
libvirt =======
While on vacation, Daniel Veillard released libvirt 0.6.0:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-January/msg00863.html
* New features: - thread safety of the API and event handling (Daniel Berrange) - allow QEmu domains to survive daemon restart (Guido Gunther) - extended logging capabilities (Daniel Veillard) - support copy-on-write storage volumes (Daniel Berrange) - support of storage cache control options for QEmu/KVM (Daniel Berrange)
Understandably, a number of post-release issues cropped up:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/484199 SELinux issue causing libvirtd launched dnsmasq to fail
This causes libvirt virtual networks to fail to start. The fix will involve a small update to libvirt and selinux-policy changes.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/484414 libvir: Remote error : no call waiting for reply with serial 2
Dan Berrange has a fix for this upstream
Also, there are reports that if QEMU is too slow starting up, it can fail:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-February/msg00143.html
A lively update was had as to whether the libvirt-0.6.0 update in F9 and F10 updates-testing should be withdrawn until some of the issues are resolved. The current plan is to just fix the issues ASAP with further updates to libvirt and selinux-policy.
F11 Features ============
All F11 virt features are now available under:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:F11_Virt_Features
KVM/QEMU Merge ==============
Glauber posted an initial qemu package, and solicited feedback. This package did two things:
1) Updated to a snapshot of QEMU svn and
2) Split the package into multiple sub-package, with a sub-package for each target architecture
There was some concern that updating to QEMU svn is not a good idea until it is known that a QEMU release is due soon. By coincidence, Anthony Liguori proposed doing a QEMU release at the end of February:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2009-02/msg00138.html
All involved were mightily relieved.
The discussion then moved on to a near-bikeshed argument about how to split the package. In the end, it was agreed to go with:
- qemu-common, containing core bits
- qemu-system-* packages containing emulators for groups of architectures, e.g. qemu-system-x86
- qemu-user, containing the Linux kernel ABI emulators for all architectures
- qemu, a meta package which requires all sub-packages for compatibility purposes
Further discussion was had on how to handle the building of BIOS images. [Details redacted to avoid scaring the children]
The whole thread can be found here:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-February/thread.html#00000
Also related, Eduardo added a kvm-tools sub-package containing kvm_stat and kvmtrace:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/480942
Device Assignment =================
The CONFIG_DMAR issue lumbered on this week. Firstly, Kyle McMartin's patch to make intel_iommu=off the default is now in Andrew Morton's queue for 2.6.29.
Progress on fixing the underlying issue is slow, but steady:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/479996
The focus is now on the fact that delaying for 2us after flushing the I/O page tables from the CPU cache appears to resolve the problem. Adar and Bhavesh from VMware are busily debugging the issue on hardware which shows the problem. David Woodhouse and Chris Wright have been working on patches to aid debugging. David has also included Joerg Roedel's CONFIG_DMA_API_DEBUG patches in Fedora rawhide.
In other news, a minor circular locking issue was found and fixed:
http://www.mail-archive.com/kvm@vger.kernel.org/msg10116.html
Also, Weidong Han re-posted several device assignment fixes for QEMU which had fallen through the cracks:
http://www.mail-archive.com/kvm@vger.kernel.org/msg10116.html
Some offline discussion was had around how to handle resetting PCI devices before and after assignming them to guests. The details are long and involved, but the core of the problem is that devices must be reset before being assigned if they have been previously used in the host.
For example, with an e1000e NIC this manifests itself with "TX Unit Hang" errors in the guest. Unfortunately, the preferred method for resetting a PCI device (Function Level Reset, or FLR) is not implemented by many devices. Alternatives include Secondary Bus Reset and PCI PM D-state transitions. Both will need to be implemented in addition to FLR support.
Xen Dom0 ========
Some welcome interest was renewed in Xen Dom0 support on the fedora-virt list this week with Gerd Hoffmann's addition of bzImage loading support to the hypervisor:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-February/msg00001.html
Several fedora-virt users are now building and testing Dom0 kernels using Jeremy Fitzhardinge's latest patch set.
kernel arches =============
Some changes to kernel architectures are on their way:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ArchitectureSupport
The main user-visible changes would be:
* 32-bit x86 would be built for i586 by default. * The x86_64 kernel would be installed on compatible hardware, even when installing a 32-bit OS * The PAE kernel would be installed on other 32-bit hardware, where it is supported
The proposal was accepted by FESCo and the kernel changes are already in rawhide.
gcc 4.4 ========
gcc-4.4 is coming in F11:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/gcc4.4
Jakub Jelinek did a test mass-rebuild of rawhide this week:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00180.html
It seemed to go pretty well. No virt packages had any problems.
Bugs ====
DOOM-O-METER: 191 open bugs last week, 192 this week. Awww!
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/480822 new_slab() oops from alloc_skb() with virtio_net, e1000 and rtl8139
Marcelo jumped on this and began investigating. At first it looked like that it was a SLUB issue. However, the crafty Marcelo came up with a crafty LD_PRELOAD lib for disabling pvmmu for testing.
Using Marcelo's hack, James Laska confirmed that the culprit is pvmmu.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/480779 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/483204 Both nVidia users who reported KVM MMU issues tryied to reproduce without nvidia loaded.
The first reporter did indeed reproduce without nVidia and Marcelo logged into his machine. The problem turned out to be dodgy RAM though. Take home point - if something funny is going on, try running memtest.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/483648 BUG_ON() in __shrink_dcache_sb() in rawhide x86_64 guest
Another oops reported by James Laska. Not yet investigated.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/484364 block-rw-range-check.patch breaks qcow2
Fedora's single not-upstream kvm-userspace patch causes us to fail under kvm-autotest.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/464790 qemu bios images source code not packaged
The BIOS images in the qemu package aren't currently built from source. This is fixed in the kvm package, so should be resolved when we merge the two.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/484166 QEmu uses 100% of two assigned cores for XP guest
Perhaps the known issue with guest CPU usage accounting?
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/467687 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/463298 virbr0 loses it's routing when managed by NetworkManager
Reporter can't reproduce after an upgrade to f10, but it seems fairly certain that the problem was something twiddling ip_forward.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/444273 The second request in recent times for libvirt autostart domains to be autoshutdown
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/477955 Sound under KVM requires exclusive access to the sound device
The debate continues on how to integrate with a user's sound configuration.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/459665 Issue with remote libvirt connections via SSH under virt-manager
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/484097 ambiguous dialog
Jon McCann noticed a virt-manager dialog:
Not Enough Free Space The requested volume capacity will exceed the available pool space when the volume is fully allocated. (4000M requested capacity >2118M available) [No] [Yes]
I say "Yes!". Or maybe "No!". No, "Yes!" ... :-)
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/484295 xen pv_ops DomU BUG() after alpha install
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Mark McLoughlin