[Libvirt-announce] Release of libvirt 5.7.0

[Daniel Veillard]

  A few hours ago I tagged the release in git and pushed the signed tarball
and source rpm to the usual place:

  https://libvirt.org/sources/

 I also tagged a release of the python bindings which you can find at

  https://libvirt.org/sources/python/

This is a balanced release with new features, improvements and bug fixes, also
note some deprecation for KVM assignment support and for build with older versions
of libxml2. 


New features:

- qemu: Support Direct Mode for Hyper-V Synthetic timers
    The QEMU driver now supports Direct Mode for Hyper-V Synthetic timers
    for Hyper-V guests.

- lib: Add virDomainGetGuestInfo()
    This API is intended to aggregate several guest agent information
    queries and is inspired by stats API virDomainListGetStats(). It is
    anticipated that this information will be provided by a guest agent
    running within the domain. It's exposed as virsh guestinfo.

- Split libvirtd into separate daemons
    The big monolithic libvirtd daemon can now be replaced by smaller
    per-driver daemons. Distributions can chose if they want the former or
    the latter. The libvirtd is still kept around for backwards
    compatibility.

Removed features:

- Remove KVM assignment support
    The KVM style of PCI device assignment was removed from the kernel in
    version 4.12.0 after being deprecated since 4.2.0. Libvirt defaults to
    VFIO for a long time. Remove support for KVM device assignment from
    libvirt too.

- libxml: min required libxml is now 2.9.1
    Support for building with libxml versions older than 2.9.1 has been
    dropped.

Improvements:

- virsh: Support setting bandwidth in migrate subcommand
    In addition to postcopy bandwidth, the virsh migrate subcommand now
    supports specifying precopy bandwidth with the --bandwidth parameter.

- libxl: Implement domain metadata getter/setter
    The libxl driver now supports virDomainGetMetadata() and
    virDomainSetMetadata() APIs.

- test driver: Expand API coverage
    Additional APIs have been implemented in the test driver.

- Report RNG device in domain capabilities XML
    Libvirt now reports if RNG devices are supported by the underlying
    hypervisor in the domain capabilities XML.

- Stop linking virt-login-shell and NSS plugins with libvirt.so
    In order to allow libvirt to abort on out of memory, we need to stop
    linking libvirt.so to virt-login-shell or the NSS plugins where we
    don't want to abort. This change also resulted in smaller binaries and
    libraries.

- qemu: Allow migration with disk cache on
    When QEMU supports flushing caches at the end of migration, we can
    safely allow migration even if disk/driver/@cache is neither none nor
    directsync.

Bug fixes:

- Various security label remembering fixes
    In the previous release libvirt introduced remembering of original
    owners and SELinux labels on files. However, the feature did not work
    properly with snapshots, on migrations or on network filesystems. This
    is now fixed.

- Allow greater PCI domain numbers
    Libvirt used to require PCI domain number to be not greater than
    0xFFFF. The code was changed to allow 32 bits long numbers.

- Various D-Bus fixes
    When D-Bus is not available, libvirt was reporting random errors. These
    are now gone.

- Prefer read-only opening of PCI config files
    When enumerating PCI bus, libvirt opens config files under sysfs mount
    and parses them to learn various aspects of the device (e.g. its
    capabilities). Only in a very limited number of cases it is actually
    writing into the file. However, it used to open the file also for
    writing even if it was only reading from it.

- Fix AppArmor profile
    Since the 5.6.0 release, libvirt uses procfs to learn the list of
    opened file descriptors when spawning a command. However, our AppArmor
    profile was not allowing such access.

- Don't block storage driver when starting or building a pool
    Starting or building a storage pool can take a long time to finish.
    During this time the storage driver was blocked and thus no other API
    involving the storage driver could run. This is now fixed.

  Thanks everybody who helped for this release, be it with patches, reviews,
bug reports, docs, etc...

   Enjoy the release !

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/