Virtualization
Virtualization in Fedora 10 includes major changes, and new features, that continue to support KVM, Xen, and many other virtual machine platforms.
Unified Kernel Image
The kernel-xen package has been obsoleted by the integration of paravirtualization operations in the upstream kernel. The kernel package in Fedora 10 supports booting as a guest domU, but will not function as a dom0 until such support is provided upstream. The most recent Fedora release with dom0 support is Fedora 8.
Booting a Xen domU guest within a Fedora 10 host requires the KVM based xenner. Xenner runs the guest kernel and a small Xen emulator together as a KVM guest.
Systems lacking hardware virtualization do not support Xen guests at this time.
For more information refer to:
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/kvm
- http://kraxel.fedorapeople.org/xenner/
- http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/XenPvops
- http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/XenPvopsDom0
Other Improvements
Fedora also includes the following virtualization improvements:
- TODO
libvirt Updated to 0.6.0
The libvirt package provides an API and tools to interact with the virtualization capabilities of recent versions of Linux (and other OSes). The libvirt software is designed to be a common denominator among all virtualization technologies with support for the following:
- The Xen hypervisor on Linux and Solaris hosts.
- The QEMU emulator
- The KVM Linux hypervisor
- The LXC Linux container system
- The OpenVZ Linux container system
- Storage on IDE/SCSI/USB disks, FibreChannel, LVM, iSCSI, and NFS
New features and improvements since 0.4.6:
- thread safety of the API and event handling
- allow QEmu domains to survive daemon restart
- extended logging capabilities
- support copy-on-write storage volumes
- support of storage cache control options for QEmu/KVM
- driver infrastructure and locking
- Test driver infrastructure
- parallelism in the daemon and associated config
- virsh help cleanups
- logrotate daemon logs
- more regression tests
- QEmu SDL graphics
- add --version flag to daemon
- memory consumption cleanup
- QEmu pid file and XML states for daemon restart
- gnulib updates
- PCI passthrough for KVM
- generic internal thread API
- RHEL-5 specific Xen configure option and code
- save domain state as string in status file
- add locking to all API entry points
- new ref counting APIs
- IP address for Xen bridges
- driver format for disk file types
- improve QEmu/KVM tun/tap performances
- enable floppies for Xen fully virt
- support VNC password settings for QEmu/KVM
- qemu driver version reporting
There were also dozens of cleanups, documentation enhancements, portability and bug fixes.
For further details refer to:
http://www.libvirt.org/news.html
virt-manager Updated to 0.6.1
The virt-manager package provides a GUI implementation of virtinst and libvirt functionality.
New features and improvements since 0.6.0:
- VM disk and network stats reporting (Guido Gunther)
- VM Migration support (Shigeki Sakamoto)
- Support for adding sound devices to an existing VM
- Enumerate host devices attached to an existing VM
- Allow specifying a device model when adding a network device to an existing VM
- Combine the serial console view with the VM Details window
- Allow connection to multiple VM serial consoles
- Bug fixes and many minor improvements.
For further details refer to:
http://virt-manager.et.redhat.com/
virtinst Updated to 0.400.1
The python-virtinst package contains tools for installing and manipulating multiple VM guest image formats.
New features and improvements since 0.400.0:
- Add virt-image -> vmx support to virt-convert, replacing virt-pack (Joey Boggs)
- Add disk checksum support to virt-image (Joey Boggs)
- Enhanced URL install support: Debian Xen paravirt, Ubuntu kernel and boot.iso, Mandriva kernel, and Solaris Xen Paravirt (Guido Gunther, John Levon, Cole Robinson)
- Expanded test suite
- Numerous bug fixes, cleanups, and minor improvements
For further details refer to:
Xen Updated to 3.3.1
Fedora 11 supports booting as a guest domU, but will not function as a dom0 until such support is provided in the upstream kernel. Support for a pv_ops dom0 is targeted for Xen 3.4.
Changes since 3.3.0:
- TODO
For further details refer to:
- http://www.xen.org/download/roadmap.html -- Xen roadmap
- http://xenbits.xen.org/paravirt_ops/patches.hg/ -- paravirt_ops patch queue