2009-03-03 Feature freeze (18 days) 2009-03-10 Beta Freeze (25 days) 2009-04-14 Final freeze (60 days)
Fedora Weekly News ==================
The latest instalment of Fedora Weekly News is out, again with a detailed virt section:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue162#Virtualization
Thanks to Dale Bewley.
QEMU/KVM Merge ==============
Glauber has been working hard towards merging the qemu and kvm packages.
This week most of the effort involved producing packages for bochs-bios, openbios and vgabios. See this mail for more details:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-February/msg00064.html
The really nasty part - which Eduardo Hobkost ealier worked through with the etherboot package - is that although the BIOS binaries need to be built on a specific platform, they need to be available for install on all architectures. For example, Bochs is built on x86, but if you run qemu-system-x86_64 on ppc you need it there too.
As an interim measure, all these packages will be first built on the required architecture, then the packager will download the new build, pack the images in a tarball and then re-build the package with this tarball. The second build will package the pre-built binaries on all arches, rather than building from source.
In future, koji/rpm will support packages with ExclusiveArch that produce noarch packages. So, e.g. Bochs will be built only on x86 and the result will be a noarch package. See also:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/NoarchSubpackages
The pacakge reviews for the three new packages are here:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/485417 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/485418 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/485420
PCI Device Assignment =====================
The offline discussion around device resetting, unbinding and filtering finally made it on-list here:
http://marc.info/?l=kvm&m=123454366317045
The upshot is that some further kernel work is required before device assignment will be fully usable in Fedora.
David Woodhouse's work continued on resolving the DMAR issues seen on some machines with intel_iommu=on:
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12578 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/479996
David's first patch fixes a problem where one platform (Mobile 4 Series Chipset). The problem is that this chipset claims to not need explicit write buffer flushing, when it does in fact need it. David's patch just ignores the RWBF hint on that platform. This should fix the issues seen with Lenovo X200 and the Dell Latitude E6400.
Another problem was found with the iwlwifi driver where the device is writing to buffers that the driver marks as read-only. David has added a fix for this issue to rawhide:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/485139
Shared Network Interface ========================
David Lutterkort updated libvir-list with his progress:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-February/msg00228.html
After talking with Dan Williams, who is working in NetworkManager, it is clear that the network interface functionality for libvirt is also useful for NM and would help them with handling system-wide interface configuration. To accomodate that, I will implement network interface configuration in a separate library (inspiringly called 'netcf', until somebody thinks of something catchier) and add public API to libvirt that will use netcf to do the actual work.
The F11 Feature page has also been updated:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Shared_Network_Interface
sVirt =====
Dan Walsh posted his thoughts on the sVirt patch set to libvir-list:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-February/msg00144.html
It appears the patch is in good shape already and could be merged very soon. Dan Berrange replied with:
I've reviewed all the submissions James has posted for comments so far, and am pretty happy with the way it now integrates with libvirt.
If yourself & James are happy with what they're doing from a SELinux / security model point of view, then there's no reason they shouldn't be posted for final merge now.
kvmclock and !constant_tsc ==========================
The fix to disable kvmclock on hosts with no constant_tsc has no been pushed to Fedora 10:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/kernel-2.6.27.15-170.2.19.fc10
Upstream, Avi has queued up the workaround for 2.6.29 here:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/avi/kvm.git;a=commit;h=f160ca75
and the real fix is queued for 2.6.30 here:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/avi/kvm.git;a=commit;h=48aa74b8
Worryingly, Levente Farkas noted that he has constant_tsc and is still seeing hangs which go away with clocksource=acpi_pm. Further investigation of this is required.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/475598
PVMMU =====
The issue with pvmmu and CONFIG_SLAB_DEBUG was resolved this week:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/480822 pvmmu causes net driver oops during guest install (new_slab)
Marcelo came up with a guest kernel fix for pvmmu (only batch user pte updates), built in koji and James Laska ran some test installs using it. Unfortunately, James couldn't reproduce with latest rawhide and, obviously, also didn't see the issue with Marcelo's patch.
Marcelo posted his patch upstream and some discussion with Jeremy Fitzhardinge yielded a patch to add a missing flush_lazy_mmu_mode() call to change_page_attr():
http://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/6531/
This patch has since been merged into Linus's tree for 2.6.29.
libvirt 0.6.0 =============
Dan Berrange pushed an libvirt-0.6.0-2 with the following fixes:
- Fix libvirtd --timeout usage - Fix RPC call problems and QEMU startup handling (rhbz #484414) - Fix unowned directories (rhbz #483442)
Further issues with this release include:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/484199 AVC denied errors when starting KVM guest https://bugzilla.redhat.com/484555 SELinux issue causing libvirtd launched dnsmasq to fail
Dan Berrange pointed out the selinux-policy changes needed. Miroslav Grepl and Dan Walsh made the changes in selinux-policy-3.5.13-45.fc10 which has been pushed to F10 updates-testing.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/484553 libvirtd segfault in libdbus after starting kvm guest
Strangely, it proved to be very difficult to get a good trace of the segfault.
In the end, the issue turned out to be nasty D-Bus/PolicyKit related segfault in libvirtd which hasn't been resolved yet.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/484649 Starting kvm guest sometimes fails - qemu taking too long?
Guido Gunther committed a patch to fix this in upstream CVS.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/484552 libnuma: Warning: /sys not mounted or no numa system.
Bogus warning being printed at library load time because libvirt now uses libnuma and libnuma was incorrectly complaining about missing sysfs files on no-numa systems.
Neil Horman fixed in numactl-2.0.2-3.
virt-manager ============
Cole merged the VM 'Overview' tab into the 'Hardware' tab and renamed it to 'Details'. He included some screenshots in his patch posting:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-February/msg00029.html
Cole also built a new package in rawhide which uses PolicyKit instead of consolehelper.
Also, this bug gives some insight into plans for virt-manager:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/459665 root consolehelper breaks remote ssh virt-manager/libvirtd connections
Cole explains that this will be fixed when virt-manager no longer runs as root.
David Cartwright points out this useful wiki page:
http://virt-manager.et.redhat.com/page/RemoteSSH
KVM ===
Marcelo has begun using patchwork to manage patches posted to the KVM list:
http://patchwork.kernel.org/project/kvm/list/
Too many patches isn't a bad complaint for a project to have, right?
Avi appears to have tagged kvm-84rc1 in git, so it looks like a new release is on the way. Don't tell anyone I told you! :-)
Package Reviews ===============
Rich Jones took it upon himself to complete the merge reviews for libvirt and gnome-applet-vm which had sat idle for 18 months:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/226055 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/225811
That's the spirit!
Cole Robinson also took ownership of gnome-applet-vm from the original author, Karel Zak, in the process.
Since package reviews are sometimes useful to refer back to, we've collected together links to all the package reviews for virt related packages here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Virtualization_package_reviews
Xen Dom0 ========
Michael Young posted a test kernel RPM containing Dom0 support:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-xen/2009-February/msg00014.html
Some discussion on how complete the current dom0 patchset is. Gerd's summary of the current situation is:
If it goes well .30 boots as dom0 kernel. I don't expect much of the backend infrastructure makes it into .30 though (i.e. you need patches to actually run guests). At this point the changes needed might be non-invasive enough that it might be reasonable to carry them as patches in the fedora kernel.
Michael is not to be deterred, though, and is preparing to start pushing these packages through Koji.
Completely unrelated, Brad Smith brings attention to a common complaint that "virsh start -c" is needed to allow users to easily get to BIOS/pygrub screen at boot:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/468457
Xen and the Art of the NX Bit =============================
Phill on the fedora-virt points out that the No Execute (NX) bit is called the Execute Disable (XD) bit in Intel documentation:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-February/msg00065.html
By enabling NX, he was able to resolve his F10 guest boot failure:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/480880
Ian Campbell posted a patch upstream to fix the issue, but it looks like it may not have been merged yet.
Bugs ====
DOOM-O-METER: 192 open bugs last week, 193 this week. Hrmph!
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/478976 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/463765 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/471000 qemu-kvm not working with evdev giving wrong key mappings
Some confusion about whether this is QEMU or evdev's fault, which Dan Berrange cleared up with:
Yes, this *IS* a QEMU/KVM bug. It has hardcoded the assumption that there is a 1-to-1 mapping of scancodes to keycodes. This just happens to be true of the 'kbd' X driver, this is not true in general, thus QEMU breaks with evdev. QEMU must be fixed.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/484364 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/485148 block-rw-range-check.patch breaks qcow
Two issues were found with our single out of tree patch for KVM. Eduardo, the hero that he is, promptly fixed both.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/484097 ambiguous dialog
Guido Gunther supplied a patch and after consulting with the GNOME HIG posted a second, better patch.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/484599 Qemu monitor "system_powerdown" command does not work
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/484295 F11 alpha boots ugly (after install) on xen paravirt
Jeremy Fitzhardinge has fixed upstream.
Fix is in 2.6.29-rc4.git4
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/469837 RFE: Support usb tablet in graphical setup via qemu
Xorg has been fixed to properly handle USB tablets.
We would like to be able to use USB tables by default for Fedora guests, but some work needs to be done to check that they are configured in absolute mode by default, rather than relative mode.
-
Mark McLoughlin