Fedora virt status June 2012 - virt - Fedora mailing-lists

10 Jul 2012


      Fere's some status bits about virt happenings in Fedora for last month (and a
bit of July):
Fedora 18
  =========
In the next coming month, we will start hitting the first important Fedora 18
dates:
July   27: Feature submission deadline
  August 07: Feature freeze (majority of the feature is in fedora)
  August 14: Alpha change deadline
Take a look at some of the virt features that Red Hatters are working on for F18:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Syscall_Filters
  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Virt_Live_Snapshots
  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Virt_Storage_Motion
  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Virt_Guest_Suspend_Hibernate
  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Virt_CPU_Memory_Hotplug
Lot's of cool stuff approaching! The current idea is that the F18 feature
freeze should line up nicely with the QEMU 1.2 feature freeze, so the F18
Alpha release should have lot's of good stuff queued up.
QEMU 1.1 release
  ================
QEMU 1.1 was released on June 2nd. Highlights from the release announcement:
- Support for passing a DTB on ARM platforms when using -kernel
 - Support for PCI emulation on -M pseries on PPC
 - KVM support for in-kernel APIC and PIC and Hyper-V support
 - A new paravirtual SCSI device (virtio-scsi)
 - Image streaming support in the block layer
 - A new bridge device that can be used without root privileges
 - Guest agent support for Windows
 - Restored ARM host support
A much more detailed changelog can be found here:
http://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/1.1
In Fedora, our QEMU package is actually based on the qemu-kvm releases, which
carry a shrinking number of kvm specific patches. qemu-kvm 1.1 was released
on July 2nd, and is currently in rawhide thanks to the quick work of Hans De
Goede and Rich Jones!
Libvirt 0.9.13 release
  ======================
Libvirt's monthly release also came out on July 2nd and promptly landed in
rawhide. Changelog highlights:
- S390: support for s390(x)
 - snapshot: implement new APIs for esx and vbox
 - snapshot: new query APIs and many improvements
 - virsh: Allow users to reedit rejected XML
 - nwfilter: add DHCP snooping
 - Enable driver modules in libvirt RPM
 - Default to enable driver modules for libvirtd
 - storage backend: Add RBD (RADOS Block Device) support
 - sVirt support for LXC domains inprovement
Libvirt 0.9.6.1 and 0.9.11.4 maintenance releases
  =================================================
Another F17 libvirt maintenance release was done, and a first release for the
F16 version. Both releases fix a number of reported issues, as detailed in the
update report:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2012-10098/libvirt-0.9.11.4-3...
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2012-9913/libvirt-0.9.6.1-1.f...
Those updates have both made it to stable, so they are only a yum update away!
Bug stats
  ==========
Bug count on June 06 2012: 296 (gulp!)
Bug count on July 10 2012: 184 (wooo!)
Dramatic drop was due to a few things:
- F15 going EOL let us close a bunch of bugs. There were still a bunch of F14
bugs lingering around as well, now closed.
- I did a brief sweep of the whole list which turned up a lot of dups, fixed
issues, or abandoned reports
- libvirt stable releases closed out a good number of issues
Breakdown of the stats:
By release:
    * Fedora 16          : 82
    * Fedora 17          : 80
    * Fedora rawhide     : 22
By package:
    * gnome-boxes        : 9
    * gtk-vnc            : 3
    * libguestfs         : 5
    * libosinfo          : 2
    * libvirt            : 38
    * libvirt-cim        : 3
    * libvirt-sandbox    : 3
    * netcf              : 3
    * python-virtinst    : 3
    * qemu               : 57
    * spice-gtk          : 7
    * virt-dmesg         : 1
    * virt-manager       : 15
    * virt-v2v           : 3
    * virt-viewer        : 6
    * virt-what          : 2
    * xen                : 12
    * xorg-x11-drv-cirrus: 2
    * xorg-x11-drv-qxl   : 10
Bugs of note
  ============
* https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=714271
libvirt pinned to single CPU after suspend/resume cycle ->
all VMs running on the same single core
Not fixed in Fedora yet, but the fix is upstream, and heading to us via kernel
stable releases.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=836913
qemu < 1.1 with qcow2 can occasionally cause data loss on shutdown.
Rich put in an heroic effort tracking this down, and determining it's fixed in
qemu 1.1 in rawhide. Still to determine what we need to backport for F17, if
that's an option.
Thanks,
Cole