[Libvirt-announce] Release of libvirt-3.10.0

[Daniel Veillard]

  A little bit late but it's out, the new release is tagged in git and
signed tarball and rpms have been pushed to the usual place:

    ftp://libvirt.org/libvirt/

I also pushed the corresponding release of python bindings at

    ftp://libvirt.org/libvirt/python/


This release brings a significant set of new features and noticeable
improvements in addition to bug fixes:


New features:

- conf: Support defining distances between virtual NUMA cells
A NUMA hardware architecture supports the notion of distances between
NUMA cells. This can now be specified using the <distances> element
within the NUMA cell configuration. Drivers which support this include
Xen and QEMU.

- Xen: Support defining vNUMA topology
Xen now supports defining a virtual NUMA topology for VMs, including
specifying distances between NUMA cells.

- qemu: Add the ability to configure HPT resizing for pSeries guests
The user can now decide whether HPT (Hash Page Table) resizing should
be enabled, disabled or required instead of leaving it up to hypervisor
defaults and negotiation between the guest and the host.

- qemu: Add vmcoreinfo feature
Starting with QEMU 2.11, the guest can save kernel debug details when
this feature is enabled and the kernel supports it. It is useful to
process kernel dump with KASLR enabled, and also provides various
kernel details to crash tools.

- conf: Move the auth and encryption definitions to disk source
Allow parsing and formatting of the auth and encryption sub-elements to
be a child of the source element. This will allow adding an auth
sub-element to a backingStore or mirror elements as a means to track
specific authentication and/or encryption needs.

Improvements:

- vbox: Add VirtualBox 5.2 support

- vbox: Add support for configuring storage controllers
The VirtualBox driver now supports the <controller> element in the
domain XML for configuring storage controllers in VBOX VMs.
Additionally, libvirt's domain XML schema was updated to allow optional
model attribute for <controller type='ide'> which is used by the VBOX
driver to set the IDE controller model to be one of 'piix4', 'piix4'
(default), or 'ich6'. Finally, with this change dumpxml generates
<controller> elements that correspond to current VBOX VM storage
controller configuration.

- vbox: Add support for attaching empty removable disks
The VirutalBox driver now supports adding CD-ROM and floppy disk
devices that do not have the disk source specified. Previously such
devices were silently ignored.

- vbox: Add support for attaching SAS storage controllers
In VirtualBox, SCSI and SAS are distinct controller types whereas
libvirt does not make such distinction. Therefore, the VBOX driver was
updated to allow attaching SAS controllers via <controller type='scsi'
model='lsisas1068'> element. If there are both SCSI and SAS controllers
present in the VBOX VM, the domain XML can associate the disk device
using the <address> element with the controller attribute, and
optionally, set the port via unit attribute.

- qemu: Generate predictable paths for qemu memory backends
In some cases management applications need to know paths passed to
memory-backend-file objects upfront. Libvirt now generates predictable
paths so applications can prepare the files if they need to do so.

- Shareable disks work properly with recent qemu
Recent qemu versions added image locking to avoid potential corruption
of disk images. This broke shareable disks with libvirt since the
feature was turned on by default in qemu. Libvirt now enables sharing
of those disks in qemu so that the image locking is not applied in that
case. Additionally libvirt now checks that shareable disks have
supported format (raw) to avoid metadata corruption.

- Improve serial console behavior on non-x86 architectures
ppc64, aarch64 and s390x guests were treating the <serial> and
<console> elements differently from x86, in some cases presenting
misleading information to the user. The behavior is now consistent
across all architectures and the information reported is always
accurate.

Bug fixes:

- vbox: Do not ignore failures to attach disk devices when defining
The define now fails and reports an error if any of the controller or
disk devices specified in the domain XML fail to attach to the
VirtualBox VM.

- vbox: Fix dumpxml to always output disk devices
The VirtualBox driver was ignoring any disk devices in dumpxml output
if there was a SAS storage controller attached to the VM.

- vbox: Fix dumpxml to always generate valid domain XML
When a VirtualBox VM has multiple disks attached, each to a different
storage controller that uses 'sd' prefix for block device names e.g.
one disk attached to SATA and one to SCSI controller, it no longer
generates XML where both would have 'sda' device name assigned. Instead
it properly assigns 'sda' and 'sdb' to those disks in the order of
appearance.

- Securely pass iSCSI authentication data
Rather than supplying the authentication data as part of the iSCSI URL
for a disk or host device, utilize the encrypted secret object to
securely pass the authentication data.


  Thanks everybody for your help getting this release out, with ideas, patches,
reviews, documentations, bug reports ...

   Enjoy this release, and please not that the next one (4.0.0) is scheduled
for mid january !

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Developers Tools http://developer.redhat.com/
veillard at redhat.com  | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library  http://libvirt.org/