Virtualization
In this section, we cover discussion on the @et-mgmnt-tools-list, @fedora-xen-list, @libvirt-list and @ovirt-devel-list of Fedora virtualization technologies.
Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley
Enterprise Management Tools List
This section contains the discussion happening on the et-mgmt-tools list
Virt-manager and QEmu Disk Polling Logs
Radek Hladik
noticed[1]
"when virt-manager
is running and polling VMs stats libvirt
log in /var/log/libivrt/qemu/vmname
is filling with messages" on the number of disk operations. After a day the log had grown to 100MB.
Daniel P. Berrange accepted[2] on behalf of libvirt
and Cole Robinson
described[3]
how to turn of disk polling in virt-manager
.
virt-viewer Persistance Through Guest Reboots
Daniel P. Berrange
said[1] that by Fedora 11 virt-viewer
will persist and wait for a guest to resume rather than exit when a guest reboots.
virt-install Wait Indefinitely for Windows Guests
Since Windows reboots during installation, John Levon patched[2] virt-install
to wait 120 minutes while installing a Windows guest. After some discussion it was decided it should wait indefinitely instead.
Fedora Virtualization List
This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-virt list.
Fedora Virt Status Update
Mark McLoughlin composed[1] another informative weekly update on the status of virtualization development in Fedora. Some highlights included:
- A
pvmmu
problem casues some guest installs on an F11 Alpha host tooops
during heavy network activity (RHBZ #480822) - Work has begun on Fedora 11 virtualization release notes.
- The 0.6.0 release of
libvirt
was not completely without problems. - All Fedora 11 virtualization features can be found all together.
- The
KVM
/QEmu
merge project has settled on a naming scheme. KVM
PCI device assignment continues to have issues. The "core of the problem is that devices must be reset before being assigned if they have been previously used in the host."- The addition of
bzImage
loading support to theXen
hypervisor is enabling users to build test Dom0 kernels. - A detailed of accounting reveals the bug count going from 191 to 192.
Merging KVM and QEmu Packages
A feature[1] in the works for Fedora 11 is a merge of the kvm
package with the qemu
package. Glauber Costa recently took the first step in this process by creating a test
build[2] and starting a very long thread[3] on naming of all the subpackages which will soon make up QEmu
.
Fedora Xen List
This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-xen list.
bzImage Dom0 Support in Rawhide Xen
Pasi Kärkkäinen
announced[1]
the lastest xen
builds in Rawhide support
bzImage
compressed dom0 kernels. Xen previously only supported
zImage
compressed kernels. This development was one of the preqequisite
work items for the Xen pvops Dom0 feature.
This good news was tempered by the fact that there is still no dom0 capable
kernel
in Rawhide. However, such a kernel
can be
built[2] for testing.
Gerd Hoffmann
reports[3]
success doing just that. Such kernels are not yet stable enough for
use[4].
Test Dom0 Xen Kernel RPM Available
M A Young
built[1]
a dom0 capable kernel
RPM. It's suitable only for testing; "use it very much at your own risk".
Libvirt List
This section contains the discussion happening on the libvir-list.
Fix for Fallout From Failed QEmu Guest Starts
Daniel P. Berrange
fixed[1] a series of events which manifested when a QEmu guest failed to start. Subsequent client connections would fail, CPU would rise to 100%, and virsh
would hang. (RHBZ #484414)
sVirt Patches to Merge in libvirt
Daniel J Walsh
looked[1] at James Morris sVirt
[2] patches for libvirt
.
"James patch, allows libvirt
to read the SELinux
context out of the xml
database and execute qemu
with the context. The second componant [sic] is to
pass the context of the image(s) and allow libvirt
to not only set the
image, but also update the default labels on disk, so a relabel will not
change the context." Daniel J Walsh started working on this second component
and wondered if they were acceptable for committing to libvirt
yet.
Daniel P. Berrange expressed[3] satisfaction with how the patches integrate with libvirt
adding
"If yourself & James are happy with what they're doing from a SELinux /
security model point of view, then there's no reason they shouldn't
be posted for final merge now."
Manage iptables with libvirt
Karl Wirth asked[1] "What if we could flexibly change the iptables rules for the different guests as they are deployed onto the node/host". This thought was not new.[2]
David Lutterkort pointed[3] out some of the thorny problems with this proposal including the fact that
"network devices may be directly assigned to guests - in that
case, we won't even see any of the packets the guest sends or receives".
Summarizing that "iptables management belongs into a higher-level management
app, like ovirt
[4], not libvirt
."
oVirt Devel List
This section contains the discussion happening on the ovirt-devel list.