[fedora-virt] Fedora virt status May 2012

[Cole Robinson]

Hey all,

I'm going to try and revive the monthly virt status report, detailing
core virt happenings in Fedora, as well as upstream bits that are
particularly interesting for Fedora.

Any comments or suggestions welcome!


Fedora virt status for April + May 2012:

  Fedora 17
  =========

After a week slip, Fedora 17 was released Tuesday May 29! There
were 4 core virt features advertised:

    https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/virtio-scsi
    https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/KVM_Guest_PMU
    https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Open_vSwitch
    https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/VirtSandbox

Other interesting virt developments include the availability of
Gnome Boxes, which integrates virt management into the core Gnome Shell
experience. Some info here:

    https://live.gnome.org/Boxes
    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2012-05-17_Gnome_Boxes

OpenStack Essex, the latest release of the popular cloud computing
stack, was also a Fedora 17 feature:

    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/OpenStack_Essex

And finally, oVirt, an advanced server virtualization management system
based on libvirt and KVM, is fully packaged for Fedora 17:

    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/oVirt

All in all a pretty exciting release!


  Fedora 18
  =========

Since F17 is wrapped, we've started down the Fedora 18 cycle. Some
interesting dates:

    2012-07-24  Feature Submission Deadline
    2012-08-07  Feature Freeze--Planning & Development Ends
    2012-08-07  Branch Fedora 18 from Rawhide-- Branch Freeze
    2012-08-14  Alpha Change Deadline

So the first real freeze is still two months off, plenty of time! :)

On the features front, nothing has been proposed yet, but expect
announcements in the near future.

If anyone out there has an interesting virt feature they are working
on and that they plan on getting into Fedora 18, drop this list a line
and we can help it get nominated as a part of the Fedora feature process.


  Libvirt stable releases
  =======================

There are now official libvirt maintenance releases:

    http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Maintenance_Releases

Right not they are just for the libvirt 0.9.11 version in Fedora 17,
but 0.9.6 releases for Fedora 16 are coming soon, as started by Eric Blake:

    http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2012-May/msg00932.html

libvirt-0.9.11.3 is now in Fedora 17:


https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2012-6964/libvirt-0.9.11.3-1.fc17

This should mean better quality updates, and quicker turnaround on bugfixes
making their way to fedora.


  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

Basically doing suspend/resume of a machine with a running VM using
with vcpus > 1 causes a performance regression as all guest vcpus
end up running on only 1 host CPU. It sounds like a fix is finally
close to hitting upstream kernel git. Currently this affects all
supported versions of Fedora :(

For people needing an immediate fix, there are workarounds noted here:

    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=813228

* https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=796479

firewalld conflicts with libvirt's default network. Basically
if firewalld is started after libvirtd has started, it blows
away the firewall rules libvirt's default network requires to
function.

firewalld is a new stateful daemon, providing a nice dbus API for
applications to interact with iptables related bits.

This was a problem around F17 beta time, since firewalld was on
by default. However that bit was eventually reverted. You will
still see issues if you manually install firewalld though.

Medium term, libvirt will talk directly to firewalld for it's
iptables management, and everything will play nice together.
Expect that, as well as firewalld by default, in the Fedora 18
timeframe.


  Admin bits
  ==========

There have been some recent administrative changes.
virt-maint at lists.fedoraproject.org now receives many more
build notifications, as well as bugzilla mail. virt-maint is now a
good list to subscribe to if you are intersted in spam about daily
virt changes in Fedora land:

    https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/virt-maint/
    http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/virt-maint/2012-May/003712.html
    http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/virt-maint/2012-May/003954.html

Also, we now have a nice stable place to host virt related bits on
fedorapeople:

    http://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/

The virtualization preview repository, which builds rawhide packages
for latest stable fedora, is now available for Fedora 17, and at the
above location. More info here:

    https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Virtualization_Preview_Repository
    http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/virt/2012-June/003287.html


Thanks,
Cole