Virtualization
In this section, we cover discussion of Fedora virtualization technologies on the @et-mgmnt-tools-list, @fedora-xen-list, @libvirt-list and @ovirt-devel-list lists.
Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley
Enterprise Management Tools List
This section contains the discussion happening on the et-mgmt-tools list
Fedora Virtualization List
This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-virt list.
F12 Feature: Host Information
Richard Jones posted[1] an RFC for a feature[2] he's working on for Fedora 12. The feature will "Allow a virtual machine to see information and statistics from the host operating system."
For example, it will "Allow a virtual machine to look at host information (such as number of physical, not just virtual CPUs), and statistics like the load on the host."
Daniel Berrange noted[3] that "a core goal of this hostinfo service is to avoid any use of networking. We don't want to presume that a guest has a NIC, nor that the host has a configured NIC on the same LAN as the guest." So this feature will make use of serial ports to pass queries and responses between the guest and the host.
libguestfs Super-minimized Appliance
Richard Jones
created[1]
a set of "very experimental" patches to 
libguestfs
Within libguestfs, "The normal appliance is a self-contained Linux operating system, based
on the Fedora/RHEL/CentOS Linux distro. So it contains a complete
copy of all the libraries and programs needed, like kernel, libc,
bash, coreutils etc etc."
"The supermin appliance removes the kernel and all the executable libraries and programs from the appliance. That just leaves a skeleton of config files and some data files, which is obviously massively smaller than the normal appliance. At runtime we rebuild the appliance on-the-fly from the libraries and programs on the host (eg. pulling in the real /lib/libc.so, the real /bin/bash etc.)"
"The new appliance is a mere 500K, so libguestfs RPMs will be a lot
smaller. Of course that just means they will have many more
dependencies, so the amount pulled down will be the same or greater."
A guest fish in the pipes
Richard Jones
patched[1]
guestfish command through a command on the host. The canonical
example is:
><fs> hexdump /bin/ls | less
Another example, looking for root backdoors in the password file:
><fs> cat /etc/passwd | awk -F: '$3 == 0 { print }' | grep -v ^root:
Anything right of the first pipe symbol gets passed to the local shell, thus expansion, redirection and so on work on that."
Libvirt List
This section contains the discussion happening on the libvir-list.
oVirt Devel List
This section contains the discussion happening on the ovirt-devel list.