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 12: The Dirty Dozen

Feature list

• Kernel SamePage Merging (KSM)
• KVM Huge Page Backed Memory
• KVM NIC Hotplug
• KVM qcow2 Performance
• KVM Stable Guest ABI
• libguestfs
• Virtual Network Interface Management
• Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV)
• Virt Privileges
• VirtgPXE
• Virt Storage Management
• libvirt TCK

Other notable points

• Released on November 17, 2009.
• Interview with various members of the team.

Fedora 11: The walled garden

Feature list

• PCI device assignment for KVM
• Merged QEMU and KVM RPMs
• sVirt confinement of virtual machines
• Improved VNC console handling
• SASL authentication for VNC

Other notable points

• Released on June 9, 2009.
• Interview with Dan Berrange on Fedora 11 Virtualization.

Fedora 10: Management at a distance

Feature list

• Virtual appliance building tools
• Remote deployment of virtualized guests
• Storage management in virtualization tools

Other notable points

• Released on November 25, 2008.

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

• Released on May 13, 2008.
• Xen Dom0 support dropped, until Xen Dom0 pv-ops work is accepted by upstream kernel community

Fedora 8: Protection from the bad guys

Feature list

• Virtualization security

Other notable points

• Released on November 8, 2007.

Fedora 7: The new kid on the block

Feature list

• KVM support

Other notable points

• Released on May 31, 2007.
• 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 Core 6: Virtualization grows up

• Released on October 24, 2006.
• 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 Core 5: The future is now

• Released on March 20, 2006.
• 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 4: Glimpse of the future

• Released on June 13, 2005.
• A preview of Xen (2.x) virtualization as a set of add-on packages, released post-release.