The 12.0.0 release of both libvirt and libvirt-python is tagged and
signed tarballs are available at
https://download.libvirt.org/https://download.libvirt.org/python/
Thanks everybody who helped with this release by sending patches,
reviewing, testing, or providing feedback. Your work is greatly
appreciated.
* New features
* bhyve: SLIRP networking support
Domain XMLs now can use SLIRP user-mode networking::
<interface type='user'>
<model type='virtio'/>
</interface>
* bhyve: virtio-scsi support
Domain XMLs now can use ``virtio-scsi`` devices::
<disk type='ctl'>
<source dev='/dev/cam/ctl'/>
<target dev='sda' bus='scsi'/>
</disk>
* bhyve: initial ARM64 support
The bhyve driver now supports booting ARM64 domains on ARM64 hosts.
This support is still in early stage of development and has some
limitations. For example, it requires using
``<clock offset='localtime'/>`` in domain XMLs, and
bootrom autofill is not implemented.
* Improvements
* qemu: Improvements and fixes to firmware selection
Firmware selection now works more reliably and predictably in many
scenarios.
Notably, issues that were preventing the use of firmware designed for
confidential VMs on aarch64 have been addressed.
* network: Introduce port for DNS forwarder
In the ``<dns/>`` section of network configuration users can set up
forwarding of DNS requests to custom DNS servers. These are specified using
``addr`` attribute. But configuring port wasn't possible, until now. New
``port`` attribute is introduced, which allows overriding the default DNS
port for given address.
* Bug fixes
* qemu: Fix startup of VMs with more than ~25 external snapshots
After switch to json-c VMs with too deeply nested image chains would fail
to start due to nesting depth limit in json-c, which is now increased to once
again support backing chains up to 200 images deep.
* qemu: TPM: Properly handle migration when storage resides on NFS
The VM now can be properly migrated in scenarios where TPM data is stored
on a shared filesystem on the destination but on the source it's either
on a different NFS or unshared completely.
* qemu: Treat memory device source nodemask as strict NUMA policy
Until now, the NUMA policy for ``<memory/>`` devices was taken either from
the guest NUMA node or ``<numatune/>``. But this may lead to discrepancies,
where the memory device is configured to bind to a set of host NUMA nodes,
but the guest NUMA node is to bind to a disjoint set of host NUMA nodes. To
resolve this, specifying ``<nodemask/>`` for a memory device implies
``strict`` policy.
* qemu: Relax validation of some hyperv features
Since 11.9.0 release, libvirt performs dependency checks for hyperv
features, for instance ``stimer`` requires ``synic``. But as it turned out,
for some ancient machine types (e.g. 'pc-i440fx-3.0' or 'pc-q35-3.0') some
dependencies are not true. Corresponding checks were removed.
* esx: URI encode inventory objects twice
Formatting domain XML for domains on an ESX server might fail if
corresponding datacenter or datastore contained special characters (e.g.
'+'). This is now fixed.
* Fix race when checking whether a path is on a shared file system
Finding an existing parent of a given path and checking whether it's on a
shared file system was not atomic and thus the path could have been
misinterpreted as non-shared if it was removed between these two
operations. This could cause migration with an emulated TPM device stored
on a shared file system to fail with the following bogus error::
Operation not supported: the running swtpm does not support migration with shared storage
Enjoy.
Jirka
I have just tagged v12.0.0-rc1 in the repository and pushed signed
tarballs to https://download.libvirt.org/
Please give the release candidate some testing and in case you find a
serious issue which should have a fix in the upcoming release, feel
free to reply to this thread to make sure the issue is more visible.
If you have not done so yet, please update NEWS.rst to document any
significant change you made since the last release.
Jirka
The 11.10.0 release of both libvirt and libvirt-python is tagged and
signed tarballs are available at
https://download.libvirt.org/https://download.libvirt.org/python/
Thanks everybody who helped with this release by sending patches,
reviewing, testing, or providing feedback. Your work is greatly
appreciated.
* Security
* CVE-2025-12748: Denial of service by some ACL-limited accounts
Parsing of user provided XMLs in APIs which needed the identification
information from those XML definitions was done in full before ACL checks
were performed. Some valid, but useless, definitions could cause allocation
of too much memory, leading to denial of service. APIs which do equate to
full root access (such as ``domain:write``), and were parsing XML
definitions in full before performing ACL checks could, potentially, be
exploited in a way that would allow users (which were about to be denied the
API call) to cause aforementioned overallocation even before the ACL checks
were performed.
A change was made so that parsing before ACL checks are done only for the
identification parts of the XML definition (which is needed to perform the
checks) and full parsing is done only after checking all ACLs.
* CVE-2025-13193: Incorrect permissions on images after external snapshot of an inactive VM
The overlay ``qcow2`` images which are created as part of creation of an
external snapshot of an inactive VM had world-readable (644) permissions
which would allow unauthorized users to see contents of blocks written by
the VM after snapshot was taken. Libvirt now sets proper umask so that
the images are created with 600 mode.
* New features
* Hyper-V virttype support for Qemu domains
Libvirt now supports Hyper-V virttype while lauching QEMU domains. This
feature requires Qemu version 10.2.0 or later and is available on Linux
hosts where the /dev/mshv is present.
* Add more statistics for block devices on QEMU domains
The block devices now report optimal access request sizes as well as
statistics such as the queue depth.
* Improvements
* bhyve: VNC ``wait`` attribute support
Bhyve guests can now be configured to wait for a VNC connection before
booting.
* remote: multiple certificate support
The remote daemon and client can be configured to load multiple x509
certificate identities. This facilitates a transition to certificates
supporting Post-Quantum Crytographic algorithms.
* tools: improved virt-host-validate output
The virt-host-validate tool will now report extra details when certain
checks pass.
* qemu: Allow backup jobs to continue if guest OS shuts down
When starting a backup job users can now use a flag which prevents the VM
to be completely cleaned up if the guest OS shuts down while the backup is
running so that the backup can be finalized.
* Bug fixes
* ch: Use correct domain definition in chDomainGetXMLDesc()
Cloud-Hypervisor driver claims to support ``VIR_DOMAIN_XML_INACTIVE`` but
in fact it never formatted the inactive XML. This is now fixed.
* esx: Allow disk images in subdirectories
If a domain has a disk image that's not in a datastore path but in a
subdirectory, the ESX driver would have failed to parse that and an error
was reported when obtaining domain XML. This is now fixed.
* qemu: Fix incoming migration to QEMU 10.0.0 and newer
Due to a change in the way QEMU 10.0.0 reports the state of "ht" CPU
feature, incoming migration of a domain with multiple CPU threads would
fail with "guest CPU doesn't match specification: extra features: ht"
error.
* qemu: fix incorrect reporting of the TDX launch security type
The TDX launch security type was incorrectly reported on all platforms
if the QEMU binary had it built-in. It is now limited to only platforms
with the TDX kernel feature available for use.
* qemu: set ``detect_zeroes`` for all backing chain layers
Some block jobs (snapshots, block commit) could modify the backing chain in
a way where ``detect_zeroes`` would no longer be honoured. We now set
it for all images in the backing chain, so that it will behave correctly
even after those operations.
Enjoy.
Jirka
I have just tagged v11.10.0-rc1 in the repository and pushed signed
tarballs to https://download.libvirt.org/
Please give the release candidate some testing and in case you find a
serious issue which should have a fix in the upcoming release, feel
free to reply to this thread to make sure the issue is more visible.
If you have not done so yet, please update NEWS.rst to document any
significant change you made since the last release.
Jirka
The 11.9.0 release of both libvirt and libvirt-python is tagged and
signed tarballs are available at
https://download.libvirt.org/https://download.libvirt.org/python/
Thanks everybody who helped with this release by sending patches,
reviewing, testing, or providing feedback. Your work is greatly
appreciated.
* New features
* Introduce Hyper-V ``host-model`` mode
Similarly to CPUs, ``host-model`` mode expands available Hyper-V
enlightenments at domain startup into the live XML so that's obvious which
enlightenments are enabled.
* Add support for Hyper-V ``spinlocks`` "never notify" mechanism
The ``retries`` attribute - which defines after how many failed
acquisition attempts to notify the hypervisor - can now hold the
special value of 4294967295 which means to never notify the
hypervisor.
If the ``retries`` attribute is omitted this value is used.
* ch: Network hotplug Support
Users can now attach and detach network interfaces of Cloud Hypervisor
domains at runtime.
* bhyve: NVMe device support
Domain XMLs now can use NVMe devices::
<disk type='file'>
<driver name='file' type='raw'/>
<source file='/path/to/disk.img'/>
<target dev='nvme0n1' bus='nvme'/>
</disk>
* Improvements
* qemu: Improvements to USB controller model selection
Virtualization-friendly USB3 controllers are now used in more situations,
Intel-specific USB controllers are relegated to x86 guests, and model
selection overall behaves more consistently across architectures.
* qemu: Validate Hyper-V enlightenment dependencies
Some Hyper-V enlightenments may require some other enlightenments to be
turned on. Libvirt now validates these for new domains.
* qemu: Introduce virtio options for virtio memory models
Both virtio-mem and virtio-pmem memory models are virtio devices and as
such now support setting various virtio knobs (iommu, ats, packed,
page_per_vq) common to other virtio devices.
* wireshark: Adapt to wireshark-4.6.0
Libvirt's wireshark dissector plugin adapted to changes made to wireshark
dissector API in its 4.6.0 release.
* qemu: 'manual' disk snapshot mode improvements
The 'manual' snapshot mode now ensures that also metadata of the images is
written out to disk so that user can take snapshots of e.g. qcow2 image
safely.
* Bug fixes
* ch: Load ``ch.conf`` from ``SYSCONFDIR``
Previously, the ``ch.conf`` file for ``ch:///system`` URI was mistakenly
loaded from a path under ``LOCALSTATEDIR`` (``/var/...``). This is now
fixed and the configuration file is loaded from the ``SYSCONFDIR``
(``/etc/...``) location where it's also installed.
Enjoy.
Jirka
I have just tagged v11.9.0-rc1 in the repository and pushed signed
tarballs to https://download.libvirt.org/
Please give the release candidate some testing and in case you find a
serious issue which should have a fix in the upcoming release, feel
free to reply to this thread to make sure the issue is more visible.
If you have not done so yet, please update NEWS.rst to document any
significant change you made since the last release.
Jirka
The 11.8.0 release of both libvirt and libvirt-python is tagged and
signed tarballs are available at
https://download.libvirt.org/https://download.libvirt.org/python/
Thanks everybody who helped with this release by sending patches,
reviewing, testing, or providing feedback. Your work is greatly
appreciated.
* New features
* ch: Disk hotplug Support
Users can now attach and detach disks of Cloud Hypervisor domains at
runtime.
* qemu: Add support for NUMA affinity of PCI devices
To support NVIDIA Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) configurations, libvirt now
handles QEMU's acpi-generic-initiator device internally. MIG enables
partitioning a physical GPU into multiple isolated instances, each
associated with one or more virtual NUMA nodes.
On the XML side, the existing ``<acpi>`` element has been extended with a
``nodeset`` attribute to specify the NUMA node affinity of a PCI device.
* Improvements
* ch: Events emitting
The CH driver not only emits more domain lifecycle events but also
implements ``virConnectDomainEventRegister()`` and
``virConnectDomainEventDeregister()`` APIs for management applications to
listen on those events.
* Bug fixes
* qemu: Fix selection of stateless/combined firmware
A stateless firmware will now be correctly chosen when appropriate,
e.g. for domains configured to use SEV-SNP.
* ch: Make sure the cloud-hypervisor process is killed in ``virCHProcessStop()``
Due to wrong assumptions in the CH driver, calling ``virDomainDestroy()``
did not kill the corresponding cloud-hypervisor process. Domains can be now
destroyed reliably.
Enjoy.
Jirka
I have just tagged v11.8.0-rc1 in the repository and pushed signed
tarballs to https://download.libvirt.org/
Please give the release candidate some testing and in case you find a
serious issue which should have a fix in the upcoming release, feel
free to reply to this thread to make sure the issue is more visible.
If you have not done so yet, please update NEWS.rst to document any
significant change you made since the last release.
Jirka
The 11.7.0 release of both libvirt and libvirt-python is tagged and
signed tarballs are available at
https://download.libvirt.org/https://download.libvirt.org/python/
Thanks everybody who helped with this release by sending patches,
reviewing, testing, or providing feedback. Your work is greatly
appreciated.
* New features
* Allow setting the log level of Cloud Hypervisor
Users can now configure the verbosity of Cloud Hypervisor by setting
the "log_level" option in ch.conf
* bhyve: experimental NAT networking support
The bhyve driver now has experimental NAT networking support
using the Packet Filter (pf) firewall.
* bhyve: domain statistics reporting
The bhyve driver now supports querying domain block, interface,
and memory statistics. Not all statistics fields are supported though.
* Improvements
* bhyve: improve 'efi' configuration autofill
When a domain is configured with ``<os firmware='efi'/>``, NVRAM configuration
is now autofilled.
Enjoy.
Jirka
I have just tagged v11.7.0-rc1 in the repository and pushed signed
tarballs to https://download.libvirt.org/
Please give the release candidate some testing and in case you find a
serious issue which should have a fix in the upcoming release, feel
free to reply to this thread to make sure the issue is more visible.
If you have not done so yet, please update NEWS.rst to document any
significant change you made since the last release.
Jirka
