[fedora-virt] Fedora virt status

[Mark McLoughlin]

F11 Release
===========

The F11 release is imminent. Happily, there are no open bugs remaining
on the virtualization blocker list.

However, the blocker list for the entire distro still has a
significant number of open bugs so Release Engineering has announced a
one week slip of the release date:

  http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-May/msg01585.html

We still have a massive list of bugs on the virt target list for F-11:

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

These bugs haven't been forgotten about and we hope to fix many of
them in post-release updates. Please do jump in and help out!

F12 Features
============

Dan Berrange has added three new feature pages for F12:

  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/VirtAppliances
  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/VirtPrivileges
  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/VirtTCK

the full list of features is available here:

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

Many more features are planned for F12 and we should see more feature
pages posted to the wiki as folks begin work on them.

Is it 'Raw Virt' or 'Virt Hide'?
================================

As discussed previously on the fedora-virt list, we're going to
maintain a 'virt preview' yum repository for Fedora 11 users who wish
to test out the latest virtualization bits from Fedora 12:

  https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-May/msg00074.html

This repository isn't intended to replace rawhide - e.g. if we had
this repository during F-11 development, it wouldn't have helped with
sVirt testing. We hope it will allow people who are interested in
virtualization - but who would not consider running rawhide - to test
some of the latest virtualization features.

Work remains in order to ensure that this repository is as useful as
possible and volunteers of help are most welcome.

Virt Test Day
=============

The F11 Virtualization Test Day was held on May 7th and was a great
success. Over 30 people turned out and a whole heap of high quality
bug reports were filed:

  https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-May/msg00046.html

Our hope is that the test cases and wiki structure used for this test
day will be re-used for similar test days for F-12 and beyond.

FWN
===

Dale Bewley continues his excellent series of virtualization sections
in Fedora Weekly News:

  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue175#Virtualization
  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue176#Virtualization
  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue177#Virtualization

FUDCon
======

The 2009 Berlin FUDCon is coming up at the end of June:

  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDConBerlin2009

Rich Jones and I will be there giving a talk and we're looking forward
to meeting any other Fedora virt folks who happen to be there too.

  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Rich_Jones_and_Mark_McLoughlin_-_Virtualization

virt-inspector
==============

Rich Jones announced the available of a new tool called
virt-inspector:

  https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-May/msg00073.html

  This is a tool based around libguestfs which can inspect a virtual
  machine disk image and tell you some interesting things about what's
  inside it.

  Some of the things it can tell you:

  - What operating system(s) are installed, and what distros and
    versions. It currently covers RHEL releases, Fedora releases,
    Debian releases, and has limited support for Windows.

  - How disk partitions are expected to be mounted (eg. /dev/sda1 -> /boot)

  - What applications are installed.

  - What kernel(s) are installed.

  - What kernel modules are installed.

  It can produce output in plain text (as a report) or in XML (to feed
  into other programs).

This is currently available for F-11 through libguestfs-1.0.27 in
updates-testing:

  https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/libguestfs-1.0.27-1.fc11.1

Xen Dom0 Kernels
================

Michael Young continues building Xen Dom0 kernels:

  http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-May/msg00099.html
  http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-May/msg00051.html

Upstream, Jeremy Fitzhardinge continues to slug it out with Ingo
Molnar to get his patches merged for 2.6.31. Latest progress here:

  http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2009-05/threads.html#00624

Bugs
====

Crikey! Streuth!

  DOOM-O-METER: 182 open bugs 3 weeks ago, 236 now.

Yes, we have bugs. Lots of them!

Seriously, we've had a huge surge in bugzilla activity since the test
day. I've even left out most of the test day bugs below, since I have
already posted details of those to the list.

= New Bugs =

== kvm ==

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499210
    OpenSolaris installer segfaults from OOM under KVM, bug not with
    unaccelerated QEMU

    Looks like some difference between KVM and TCG is causing the
    OpenSolaris installer to handle OOM differently.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/346151
    Create a kvm user account and kvm group
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/497341
    Make the /dev/kvm device world accessible to all users by default
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/500472
    QEMU driver should run all QEMU VMs as non-root system account

    All bugs related to the VirtPrivileges feature for F-12.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/500866
    virtio-net driver does not support ethtool drvinfo query

    The virtio-net driver should probably support some more ethtool
    queries.

== qemu ==

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499060
    qemu-kvm with -vga std does not provide widescreen resolution in
    win xp guest

    Looks like a vgabios regression since qemu-0.9.1. Glauber pushed a
    rebase to a newer version from upstream, but that only seems to
    make matters worse.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/501545
    "qemu-kvm -vga std" broken with vgabios 0.6c

    Details on how 0.6c makes things worse; it's been unpushed from
    F-11 but we've left it in F-12 for now.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499542
    qemu graphics corruption with -vga vmware

    Looks like -vga vmware is totally broken at the moment, that's
    assuming it isn't a guest driver issue.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/502058
    qemu -no-kvm guest hangs at during timer setup; works with noapic
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/502440
    qemu -no-kvm guest oops during IO-APIC setup

    Looks like two possibly related APIC issue when running qemu-kvm
    -no-kvm. This preventing us from doing a "make check" during
    libguestfs build.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/501264
    qemu segfaults for -net socket,listen=localhost:4567

    Fixed upstream, Glauber has proposed the fix for the stable
    branch.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499596
    32 bit KVM guest hangs enabling NX protection; booting with -cpu
    qemu32 works

    We're pinning our hopes on the cpuid trimming patches fixing this,
    but it's not totally clear they will.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/501131
    qemu segfault when VNC client disconnects

    It looks like this is an issue with the way qemu's vnc code
    handles I/O errrors. A hacky patch has been built for the reporter
    to verify that theory.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/500863
    qemu -kernel/-initrd with 4Gb memory and F6 image results in
    "initramfs bad gzip magic"

    Daire Byrne, aka "-kernel man", found yet another bug with
    qemu-kvm -kernel. Glauber promptly fixed this upstream and it will
    be in the qemu-0.10.5 update we hope to push next week.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/501935
    qemu-kvm -kernel should parse "vga=" cmdline option

    Daire also discovered an oddity whereby vga= option is ignored if
    you boot with -kernel. It turns out the bootloader implements this
    option and, so, qemu should implement it too.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/500317
    Vista install fails in qemu guest (without kvm)

== libvirt ==

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499223
    Add virt-install --virt-type option and make kvm the default

    In F-12, the plan is to no longer require --accelerate to be
    specified in order to use kvm.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499970
    F12: port libvirt to PolicyKit 1.0

    Repeat after me: "We loves ABI changes".

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/501934
    libvirt bridge should not have IPv6 disabled

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499669
    libvirt QEMU driver is using old pci_add/pci_del syntax

    PCI hotplug isn't currently working because qemu-kvm's monitor
    command syntax has changed and hasn't been updated to use that
    syntax.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/501550
    virtio console device has lame PCI class info

    ajax reports that virtio-console's PCI class is bogus and proposes
    a patch to fix it. The patch has now been posted upstream.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/501328
    Add support for virtio console in libvirt QEMU driver
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/501720
    upstart does not launch a login process on /dev/hvc0 in all cases

    The plan here is to enable virtio console for Linux guests by
    default and have them unconditionally configure it as a
    console. This will give us an "always available" console like we
    have for Xen.

== virtinst ==

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/500320
    Vista needs >15G; add "minimum disk size" to python-virtinst
    OS_TYPES table?

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/502088
    virt-clone.log does not get closed on exec

== virt-manager ==

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499812
    host screensaver kicks in while virt-manager guest console is
    grabbed

    Dan reckons this is a problem for gnome-screensaver, but most
    likely this is just a fundamental limitation of X grabs and
    virt-manager will have to explicitly inhibit the screensaver.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/501922
    virt-manager: NFS install of guest complains about insufficient
    privilege

    Another side effect of us not running virt-manager as root by
    default anymore. We should be able to use libvirt's storage
    management APIs to fix this.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/500940
    virt-manager should delete failed guest images

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/502204
    virt-manager's dialog to connect an existing CD-ROM to an ISO does
    not use storage pool interface

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/502333
    virt-manager should show guest disk size in Details

== libguestfs ==

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/501878
    guestfish built-in commands like 'alloc' and 'help' don't
    autocomplete
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/501882
    /tmp/libguestfs temporary directory is not cleaned up
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/501883
    javadoc messed up in libguestfs java documentation
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/502074
    libguestfs checksum test (of SHA1) fails on i586 (running under
    qemu sans kvm)
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/502309
    libguestfs build failure - tests occasionally fail with 'ranlib:
    './libmlguestfs.a': No such file'

    Rich moved his libguestfs TODO list to bugzilla. These are the
    ones that are particularly interesting for Fedora, the rest are in
    the 'Virtualization Tools' bugzilla product.

== xen ==

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499850
    RFE: Implement the Xen PV-on-HVM drivers

    We want to re-gain support for Xen paravirt devices in HVM guests,
    but we're not quite clear yet that anyone is going to get to it
    any time soon.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/501720
    upstart does not launch a login process on /dev/hvc0 in all cases

    Fedora isn't always setting up a tty for Xen PV guests any more.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/458385
    Running gdb in F-9 x86_64 guest on RHEL 5.2 x86_64 host crashes
    guest

    Jeremy Fitzhardinge has reportedly fixed this upstream so we
    should apply those patches to F-11.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499611
    Hotplugging vcpus to an F-11 64-bit Xen domU doesn't work

    Justin Forbes has proposed a udev script to automatically online
    CPUs as they are added.

= Resolved Bugs =

== kvm ==

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/492838
    kvm: PTHREAD_PRIO_INHERIT mutexes fail to unlock sometimes with 32
    bit i686/PAE guest kernel, works on i686/non-PAE

    Avi heroically figured out this bug after much faffing about on
    everyone else's part. It turns out to need two separate fixes for
    the paravirt MMU.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499307
    BUG() in kvm_handle_fault_on_reboot() on amd64 host during RHEL5.3
    guest install

    There are over a hundred of these logged to kerneloops.org. Turns
    out to be caused by the VirtualBox kernel module. WONTFIX.

== qemu ==

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/498405
    qemu disk image corruption with qcow2/virtio

    Avi looked into this and came up with a workaround patch. Much
    discussion ensued upstream with Avi, Kevin and Gleb as they
    grappled to understand the code and in the end Gleb came up with
    a simple fix. The fix was included in qemu-kvm-0.10.4 which is now
    available in F11 updates-stable.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499666
    Reboot fails when using qemu -kernel

    Glauber posted a patch to qem-devel for this and built the fix as
    an F-11 update.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/494075
    openbios bug causes qemu-system-ppc "invalid/unsupported opcode"
    failure

    This seems to be due to a change in binutils in F11. Pavel Roskin
    fixed the problem in upstream openbios and a openbios-1.0-1.fc11
    update has been pushed with the fix. We expect there are more
    issues to be resolved here.

== libvirt ==

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

    libvirt wasn't correctly re-labelling shared or read-only images
    when starting a guest. Dan Berrange came up with a patch for this
    issue and built just in time for the test day.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/460649
    libvirtd requires restart in order to detect new capabilities like
    KVM support

    Cole came up with a patch for this, posted upstream and built in
    F-11, also in advance of the test day.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499791
    virt-manager does not escape special characters in ISO file name

    libvirt gets XML attribute escaping wrong. DV has fixed upstream
    and that fix is available in libvirt-0.6.2-9.fc11.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499584
    info balloon is repeated in qemu log once per second

    Fixed in libvirt-0.6.2-10.fc11 by only logging monitor output to
    the debug logs, not the domain log file.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/501912
    libvirt/qemu does not activate bridge if no IP address is assigned

    This little oversight was fixed upstream recently and the fix has
    been cherry-picked for F-11 in libvirt-0.6.2-11.fc11.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499698
    'virsh destroy' destroys multiple VMs

    Dan Berrange posted a fix for this to the bug report which is now
    upstream and in F-11 updates-testing.

== virt-manager ==

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/491683
    virt-manager no longer auto adjusts to guest screen size

    Dan Berrange tracked this down to a recent change which explictly
    sets the window size in virt-manager. The fix has been pushed to
    update-testing in virt-manager-0.7.0-5.fc11.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499145
    virt-manager appears to ignore arch selection

    Cole implemented this and and the patch has been include in the
    virt-manager-0.7.0-5.fc11 update.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499589
    virt-manager console widget doesn't know how to collect a 'username'
    for authentication with VNC

    Dan's patch to implement this is in virt-manager-0.7.0-5.fc11.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/495128
    "New VM" dialog box misspells "operating" as "opertaing"

    Another minor victory in the War on Spelling Mistakes. Even the
    translations have been purged of this evil typo.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499685
    RFE - include virt type in virt-manager Guest->Details tab

    It's very hard for users to tell whether they're guest is actually
    using KVM. This new UI added by Cole for F-12 will make it
    easier.

== libguestfs ==

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/501761
    libguestfs requires qemu, not qemu-system-x86 or qemu-system-ppc

    Rich continues his crusade to over-inflate the dependencies of
    Fedora packages.

== xen ==

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499621
    F-11 Xen 64-bit domU stack traces when unmounting a disk

    Justin backported the fix for this to the F-11 kernel.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499592
    F-11 Xen 64-bit domU cannot be started with > 2047MB of memory

    Chris Lalancette came up with a fix for this issue and Justin
    pushed it to F-11. Jeremy Fitzhardinge plans to push a slightly
    different patch upstream.

== anaconda ==

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/496298
    F11 Beta :: under KVM anaconda detect cdrom media because udev
    doesn't probe for filesystem type

    This blocker appears to have finally been stomped.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499194
    anaconda fails to install grub in KVM guest

    It seems anaconda was briefly broken wrt. installing grub in a KVM
    guest for a while because of /dev/ being unmounted. Fixed in later
    builds.

= Ongoing Bugs =

== qemu ==

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/496627
    qemu-kvm es1370 sound card emulation segfault
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/495964
    qemu locks up at shutdown with sdl audio driver

    Tom London confirmed that the pulseaudio backend resolves this
    issue. However, qemu will not default to the pulseaudio backend
    even if it is enabled. This needs to be addressed upstream.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/477035
    EFI BIOS support in qemu

    Peter Jones has been looking into this and keeping notes here:

      https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pjones/KvmEFI

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/494541
    [KVM] E1000 PXE boot fails with "No IP address"

    It looks like building with PXE_DHCP_STRICT helps at least the
    reporter, so an update with this enabled has been pushed to
    updates-testing.

== libvirt ==

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/490191
    virt-manager cannot open VM serial console because of /dev/pty
    permissions

    Dan Berrange comments that this can't be fixed until virt-manager
    uses qemu:///session by default. See also the VirtPrivileges F12
    feature.

== virt-manager ==

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/478418
    virt-manager prevents key combinations like alt-f from being sent
    to the guest
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/499362
    virt-viewer prevents key combinations like alt-f from being sent
    to the guest

    Dan Berrange describes how virt-manager and virt-viewer needs to
    intercept, and block, various key combinations before they are
    processed by gtk+ so that they can be sent to the guest. He has
    fixed this for virt-viewer, but the update needs pushing.