Virtualization/History

History of Virtualization in Fedora

Fedora has been leading the pack of Linux distributions with the introduction of new virtualization features for many years now. This page provides a history of noteworthy milestones in Fedora's virtualization support.

Fedora Core 4: Glimpse of the future

• A preview of Xen (2.x) virtualization as a set of add-on packages, released post-release.

Fedora Core 5: The future is now

• First release to include Xen 3.0 virtualization for host and guest, as officially supported package.
• Installs of paravirtualized guests, with a text mode installer
• Early version of libvirt for managing Xen guests

Fedora Core 6: Virtualization gets serious

• Expanded Xen support including fully virtualized guests.
• Graphical framebuffer for paravirtualized guests
• Graphical installs of para & fully virtualized guests.
• Expanded libvirt APIs to allow monitoring of performance
• Debut of virt-manager tool for managing Xen guests locally with embedded graphical console
• The foundation of Xen support in RHEL-5

Fedora 7: The new kid on the block

Feature list

• KVM support

Other notable points

• Continued support for Xen
• The introduction of KVM to native kernels for fullyvirtualized guests.
• libvirt gains a new hypervisor driver for managing QEMU and KVM guests.
• libvirt introduces 'virtual networking' capability providing 'out of the box' NAT based network connectivity for guests which plays nicely with NetworkManager.

Fedora 8:

Feature list

• Virtualization security

Fedora 9: Farewell to old friends

Feature list

• Xen fullyvirt direct kernel boot
• SASL authentication support
• PolicyKit authentication support
• Xen pv_ops DomU

Other notable points

• Xen Dom0 support dropped, until Xen Dom0 pv-ops work is accepted by upstream kernel community