[fedora-virt] Fedora virtualization status report

Fri Apr 3 12:41:22 UTC 2009

The F11 final development freeze is getting very close:

    2009-04-14 Final freeze (12 days)

There's a huge pile of bug-fixing and polish work to do in that
time. If you're looking to help out, there's no better place to start
than the F11VirtBlocker/F11VirtTarget tracker bugs:

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=F11VirtBlocker&hide_resolved=1
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=F11VirtTarget&hide_resolved=1

F11 Beta Release
================

The Fedora 11 Beta was announced last week:

  http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-March/msg00012.html

Please do take the time to try it out and file bugs!

Fedora Weekly News
==================

Another week, another FWN issue with a virtualization section from
Dale Bewley:

  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue169#Virtualization

F11 QEMU
========

There has been confusion all round on what version of QEMU will be
included in the Fedora 11 release. The confusion stems from the fact
that qemu is now being built from a kvm-userspace tarball, not the
recently release qemu-0.10.1 tarball.

The plan for F11 is to release with an official kvm-userspace tarball
released from the upstream stable branch which is based on
qemu-0.10.x. However, since upstream KVM hasn't made that release
quite yet, rawhide contains a snapshot of the upstream stable branch
of kvm-userspace.

The upstream stable branch was only created this week, and Glauber
promptly went ahead and replaced the snapshot of the development
branch in rawhide with a snapshot of the stable branch. He also needed
to backport the VNC SASL patches and some gcc build fixes. Everyone
should keep an eye out for regressions!

In other news, FESCo rubber-stamped the kvm/qemu merge feature for F11:

  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/KVM_and_QEMU_merge

This just means the feature will now be pimped in the release notes.

On the bugs front, the GCC bug affecting qemu was fixed this week:

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/490512
     segfault in stw_kernel when qemu is run
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/490509
     GCC register allocation wrongly using ebp

     The gcc bug has been fixed, so qemu should be fixed since
     qemu-0.10-0.12.kvm20090323git.fc11

Also:

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/457979
      Update QEMU to use gPXE roms for iSCSI boot support

      Glauber posted a patch upstream to allow enough ROM space for
      gPXE. The fix was accepted upstream and Glauber cherry-picked it
      into rawhide.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/471000
      QEMU processes input from arrow keys incorrectly

      glommer backported the evdev patch to F-10 qemu-kvm and pushed
      to updates-testing. Please test and update its karma!

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/492075
      qemu package missing debuginfo for qemu-img

      Glauber's patch upstream prompted a configure --disable-strip
      option to be added. Latest rawhide qemu is building with this
      option and we have debuginfo back again.

F11 Translations
================

The Fedora i18n team created a bunch of bugs against virt-manager,
virt-df, virt-mem and virt-top to allow them to submit translations
for Fedora 11:

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/493795 (virt-manager)
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/493797 (virt-df)
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/493798 (virt-mem)
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/493799 (virt-top)

Fedora 12 Development
=====================

Some people are mighty impatient and already eager to start working
towards Fedora 12. To that end, Jesse announced that maintainers can
request their packaged be branched for F12:

  http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg02029.html

The kernel guys have started building the 2.6.30-rc0 kernels and they
can be downloaded from Koji.

Again, the virt features already planned for F12 are listed here:

  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:F12_Virt_Features

Shared Network Interface
========================

In a similar vein, Laine Stump and David Lutterkort have been pushing
ahead with the network interface configuration support that's planned
for libvirt in Fedora 12. Laine posted an API proposal to libvir-list:

  http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/thread.html#00397

More details on the F12 feature can be found here:

  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Shared_Network_Interface

libvirt Release Schedule
========================

Daniel Veillard posted his plans for the next libvirt release and this
prompted a healthy discussion on libvirt's release process and
schedule. Among the options being discussed are monthly releases,
feature freezes and stable releases:

  http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/thread.html#00425

Related is the question of whether every new release of libvirt (and
other virt packets) should be pushed to stable Fedora releases. More
on this soon.

libguestfs
==========

Rich Jones posted a blog about a new project he is working on to
create an API to allow accessing and modifing guest images. True to
form, Rich's idea is firmly in the crazy-but-might-just-work category:

  http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/libguestfs-access-and-modify-virtual-machine-disk-images/

  ...
  Now step aside for a minute and think about virtual machine disk
  images. From the host, they look like files or partitions, but they
  contain a partition table, partitions, perhaps LVM, a variety of
  filesystems like ext3 or NTFS or btrfs, and the whole lot might be
  wrapped in a tricky container such as qcow2. For virt-df we actually
  wrote new code that can decode a lot of this, but it’s a massive
  effort to keep up with changes in the formats.

  What we need to use is the Linux kernel code directly.

  The way I’m going to do this is to boot a Linux kernel. A small, you
  might say “minimal” Linux distro, with a bit of userspace. The whole
  thing runs inside a qemu container, and we talk from a small library
  to the userspace inside qemu, giving it instructions like “edit this
  file”, “run this program”, “install this device driver”.

Xen Dom0
========

Michael Young continued updating his test kernels and posted a URL for
yum repo:

  http://fedorapeople.org/~myoung/dom0/

Pasi Kärkkäinen reports that CONFIG_HIGHPTE is broken on some
machines and Michael has disabled this in his latest build.

Upstream, Jeremy Fitzhardinge pushed the dom0 changes directly to
Linus, which seems to have got Ingo all riled up:

  http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/3/31/362

It looks like Linus may have just ignored the pull request. Time will
tell.

Bugs
====

DOOM-O-METER: 185 bugs last week, 192 this week. Bah!

(On a side note - this metric includes NEEDINFO bugs; we should
 probably do a run through to clean those up)

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/490266
      virtio_net tx stall with segmentation offload

      Guest->remote GSO failure with 2.6.29 host, but not 2.6.27.
      Herbert's fix was pulled into rawhide from upstream.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/492082
      anaconda "unitialized drive" warning is a little too terrifying

      Further discussion on anaconda's "YOU WILL LOSE ALL DATA"
      warning. The current suggestion is that virtinst should add an
      empty partition table to the disks it creates.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/492523
      [Fedora Xen]: pvops kernels won't boot on processors without
      the NX bit
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/480880
      f10 x86_64 xen guests fail to boot on f8 host (NX issue)

      Chis Lalance investigated the pv_ops NX issue some more and
      poked upstream into action. It looks like Chuck Ebbert is going
      to include the fix from upstream for F11.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/478734
      selinux blocks kvm network configuration script
      (e.g. /etc/qemu-ifup)

      Some configurations currently require an /etc/qemu-ifup script,
      but this is blocked by SELinux. Plan is to support these
      configurations in libvirt directly.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/492829
      virt-manager console should only scale console when maximised
      or fullscreen

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/469830
      RFE: Let details view remember the View->Scale display state

      Resolved by the "Graphical Console Scaling" preference.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/493692
      Creating new VM; SELinux prevents opening iso image of install media

      Sounds like an sVirt related problem.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/493256
      network install gives "Permission denied:
      '/var/lib/libvirt/boot/virtinst-.treeinfo.XIYNd_"

      An F10 bug with latest virt-manager. Another SELinux issue?

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/493258
      "Disk is already in use by another guest!"

      Latest virt-manager warning that another guest is using disk
      image, when the previous guest has been deleted.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/493408
      Can't use API to create virtual floppy drive with correct device
      name

      Issue with providing floppy drives to guests using
      virt-install. Fix is upstream and looks easy to cherry-pick into
      rawhide.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/493414
      Windows installs require manual reboot in the middle

      During an install using virt-install, Windows is seen to shut
      down rather than reboot. May be a generic KVM reboot issue with
      Windows.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/492523
      xen pvops kernels won't boot on processors without the NX bit

      What looks like a fix for this issue is in Jeremy's queue