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ANNOUNCE: libvirt-dbus 1.4.0 released
by Pavel Hrdina 01 May '20

01 May '20

I'm happy to announce the release of libvirt-dbus 1.4.0. libvirt-dbus wraps libvirt API to provide high-level object-oriented API better suited for dbus-based applications. https://libvirt.org/sources/dbus/libvirt-dbus-1.4.0.tar.xz * New features - Support for all relevant domain snapshot APIs * Build-system changes - Converted to meson/ninja build system * Documentation - Everything was converted to reStructuredText Thanks everybody who contributed! Pavel

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Entering freeze for libvirt 6.3.0
by Daniel Veillard 28 Apr '20

28 Apr '20

We are getting close to the end of the month, so I tagged RC1 in git and pushed signed source tarball and rpms to the usual place: https://libvirt.org/sources/ Seems to work fine in my very limited testing, CI seems green except for a couple of mingw tests, so that looks good from a distance. Please give it some testing, RC2 should land on Thursday, and then if everything looks fine I could push the final version over the coming week-end. Stay safe, please test it, thanks, Daniel -- Daniel Veillard | Red Hat Developers Tools http://developer.redhat.com/ veillard(a)redhat.com | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/ http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library http://libvirt.org/

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Release of libvirt-6.2.0
by Daniel Veillard 02 Apr '20

02 Apr '20

Mea-culpa I forgot to push RC2 on Tuesday, rather than pushing the release off by 2 more days, I decided to push the release today to stay on schedule. As a result 6.2.0 is out, tagged in git and source tarball and rpm are available at the usual place: https://libvirt.org/sources/ I also pushed a release of the python binding with minimal changes that can be found at: https://libvirt.org/sources/libvirt/ New features: - qemu: NVDIMM support for pSeries guests QEMU 5.0 implements NVDIMM memory support for pSeries guests. This is done by adding an 'uuid' element in the memory XML, which can either be provided in the XML or, if omitted, generated automatically. - qemu: Add virtiofs support This feature, introduced in QEMU 4.2, is a more modern alternative to virtio-9p, which is exposed through the same <filesystem/> element. - admin: Support reloading TLS certificates After renewing TLS certificates, it was usually necessary to restart libvirtd for the new ones to be loaded: now the same result can be obtained without restarting the daemon by using virt-admin server-update-tls. Removed features: - Removed support for INI style of comments With switching of our internal code to GLib, parsing of client authentication config files is handed over to GLib which does not support INI style of comments starting with a semicolon (;). Use number sign (#) instead. * Improvements - qemu: Don't compare local and remote hostnames on migration This check was introduced to prevent same-host migration, but did not work as expected when multiple libvirtd instances were running on the same host but in different containers. With this release, the host UUID (which should be unique to the container) is checked instead. - qemu: Use per-VM event loops Instead of using a single even loop to process communication with the QEMU monitor and guest agent, create a separate one for each VM. This helps with scalability and prevents scenarios where a single malfunctioning VM could affect all those running on the same host. - qemu: Support migration with SLIRP helper interface With QEMU 5.0, a new D-Bus backend allows migration of external processes. When needed, libvirt will start a per-vm D-Bus bus, and migrate the slirp-helper along with QEMU. Bug fixes: - qemu: Open backing chain late for shallow block copy reusing external images With introduction of -blockdev for QEMU storage configuration in libvirt-5.10 we've started opening the backing chain of the destination/mirror of a virDomainBlockcopy started with VIR_DOMAIN_BLOCK_COPY_REUSE_EXT | VIR_DOMAIN_BLOCK_COPY_SHALLOW flags when starting the job rather than when virDomainBlockJobAbort with VIR_DOMAIN_BLOCK_JOB_ABORT_PIVOT is issued. For users depending on this undocumented quirky pre-blockdev behaviour this caused a regression as the backing chain could not be modified while the copy of the top image was progressing due to QEMU image locking. Note that this fix also requires qemu-5.0 while -blockdev is used starting from QEMU-4.2. - Don't generate machine names containing dots Even though the guest name containing dots is not a problem for libvirt itself, we need to strip them out when registering with machined because of the latter's requirements. Thanks everybody who contributed to this release be it with bug reports, fixes, reviews, documentation, etc ... Enjoy the release, stay safe! Daniel -- Daniel Veillard | Red Hat Developers Tools http://developer.redhat.com/ veillard(a)redhat.com | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/ http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library http://libvirt.org/

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Entering freeze for libvirt-6.2.0
by Daniel Veillard 27 Mar '20

27 Mar '20

I forgot to announce plans, sorry about this, entering freeze now I hope there isn't too many pending patchestargetting this release. The plan would be to push the RC2 on Tuesday with a release on April 2nd if everything goes fine. You can find the signed tarball and source rpm at the usual place: https://libvirt.org/sources/ the rc1 is also tagged in git. Please give it a try, so we can have a normal release, in those time of pandemy, take care, stay safe, thanks ! Daniel -- Daniel Veillard | Red Hat Developers Tools http://developer.redhat.com/ veillard(a)redhat.com | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/ http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library http://libvirt.org/

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Release of libvirt-6.1.0
by Daniel Veillard 04 Mar '20

04 Mar '20

It's out, one day late, though I did the build and pushed the tag in git yesterday, but I had forgotten to push the commit, thanks Boris for raising this to me. So it's now available as signed tarball and rpm source package at the usual place: https://libvirt.org/sources/ This release come with a number of new features as listed below but also make the packaging change of not relying on gnulib anymore for platform compatibility, so there are some serious changes in this version: New features: - qemu: new rng backend type: builtin It implements qemu builtin rng backend. That uses getrandom syscall to generate random, no external rng source needed. Available since QEMU 4.2. - support for virtio+hostdev NIC <teaming> QEMU 4.2.0 and later, combined with a sufficiently recent guest virtio-net driver (e.g. the driver included in Linux kernel 4.18 and later), supports setting up a simple network bond device comprised of one virtio emulated NIC and one hostdev NIC (which must be an SRIOV VF). (in QEMU, this is known as the "virtio failover" feature). The allure of this setup is that the bond will always favor the hostdev device, providing better performance, until the guest is migrated - at that time QEMU will automatically unplug the hostdev NIC and the bond will send all traffic via the virtio NIC until migration is completed, then QEMU on the destination side will hotplug a new hostdev NIC and the bond will switch back to using the hostdev for network traffic. The result is that guests desiring the extra performance of a hostdev NIC are now migratable without network downtime (performance is just degraded during migration) and without requiring a complicated bonding configuration in the guest OS network config and complicated unplug/replug logic in the management application on the host - it can instead all be accomplished in libvirt with the interface <teaming> subelement "type" and "persistent" attributes. - support BR_ISOLATED flag for guest interfaces attached to a Linux host bridge Since Linux kernel 4.18, the Linux host bridge has had a flag BR_ISOLATED that can be applied to individual ports. When this flag is set for a port, traffic is blocked between that port and any other port that also has the BR_ISOLATED flag set. libvirt domain interface config now supports setting this flag via the <port isolated='yes'/> setting. It can also be set for all connections to a particular libvirt network by setting the same option in the network config - since the port for the host itself does not have BR_ISOLATED set, the guests can communicate with the host and the outside world, but guests on that network can't communicate with each other. This feature works for QEMU and LXC guests with interfaces attached to a Linux host bridge. - qemu: Introduce the 'armvtimer' timer type QEMU 5.0 introduces the ability to control the behavior of the virtual timer for KVM ARM/virt guests, and this new timer type exposes the same capability to libvirt users. - qemu: Storage configuration improvements Libvirt now accepts <backingStore type='volume'> and allows specifying the offset and size of the image format container inside the storage source via the <slices> subelement. - qemu: Introduce the 'tpm-spapr' TPM model This device, available starting from QEMU 5.0, is limited to pSeries guests. Improvements: - qemu: Image format probing is allowed in certain cases To resolve regressions when users didn't specify the backing image format in the overlay, libvirt now probes the format in certain secure scenarios which fixes a few common existing cases. Additionally the knowledge base was extended to provide more information on how to rectify the problem. - qemu: Support "dies" in CPU topology This CPU topology concept, new in QEMU 4.1.0, sits between the existing "socket" and "core". - libxl: Add support for Credit2 scheduler parameters - lxc: Add support LXC 3 network configuration format Bug fix: - conf: Do not generate machine names ending with a dash Recent systemd versions do not allow them. Packaging changes: - use of gnulib has been completely eliminated Historically libvirt has embedded gnulib to provide fixes for various platform portability problems. This usage has now been eliminated and alternative approaches for platform portability problems adopted where required. This has been validated on the set of platforms covered by automated CI build testing. Other modern Linux distros using glibc are expected to work. Linux distros using non-glibc packages, and other non-Linux platforms may encounter regressions when building this release. Please report any build problems encountered back to the project maintainers for evaluation. Thanks everybody for your help with this release, and sorry for the delay, Daniel -- Daniel Veillard | Red Hat Developers Tools http://developer.redhat.com/ veillard(a)redhat.com | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/ http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library http://libvirt.org/

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Entering freeze for libvirt 6.1.0
by Daniel Veillard 29 Feb '20

29 Feb '20

As suggested yesterday, I just tagged RC1 in git and pushed signed tarball and source rpm to the usual place: https://libvirt.org/sources/ Seems to work fine in my limited testing, CI is green (amazing !) https://ci.centos.org/view/libvirt/ so looks fine so far, please give it some testing, planning RC2 on Friday with a possible delivery next Monday, thanks, Daniel -- Daniel Veillard | Red Hat Developers Tools http://developer.redhat.com/ veillard(a)redhat.com | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/ http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library http://libvirt.org/

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Release of libvirt-php-0.5.5
by Michal Prívozník 08 Feb '20

08 Feb '20

After 2.5 years, I'm glad to announce new release of PHP bindings. You can download them from here: https://libvirt.org/sources/php/libvirt-php-0.5.5.tar.gz The changelog contains a lot of code cleanups, bug fixes and some new APIs implemented (virDomainReset and virDomainInterfaceAddresses). Thanks to everybody who helped with the release. Michal

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[Libvirt-announce] Release of libvirt-6.0.0
by Daniel Veillard 15 Jan '20

15 Jan '20

As planned the release is available, tagged in git, and the signed tarball and source rpm are available from the usual place: https://libvirt.org/sources/ I also made the release of the pythn bindings which can be found at: https://libvirt.org/sources/python/ This release carries some serious changes, dropping the support for python2 and the phyp Power Hypervisor. This comes with a set of new features and improvements too: Packaging changes: - support for python2 is removed Libvirt is no longer able to be built using the Python 2 binary. Python 3 must be used instead. - docs: the python docutils toolset is now required The use of rst2html has been introduced for the website build process since docs are now being written in the RST as an alternative to HTML. New features: - new PCI hostdev address type: unassigned A new PCI hostdev address type 'unassigned' is introduced. An unassigned PCI hostdev behaves like any regular PCI hostdev inside Libvirt, but it is not usable by the guest. This gives the user a new option to manage the binding of PCI devices via Libvirt, declaring PCI hostdevs in the domain XML but allowing just a subset of them to be assigned to the guest. - Provide init scripts for sub-deaemons So far libvirt shipped systemd unit files for sub-daemons. With this release, init scripts are available too. Package maintainers can choose which one to install via --with-init-script configure option. - qemu: Support cold-unplug of sound devices - qemu: Implement VIR_MIGRATE_PARAM_TLS_DESTINATION This flag, which can be enabled using virsh's --tls-destination option, allows migration to succeed in situations where there is a mismatch between the destination's hostname and the information stored in its TLS certificate. - qemu: Support reporting memory bandwidth usage stats Implement Intel RDT-MBM in libvirt. The stats can be obtained via virsh domstats --memory. - qemu: Allow accessing NVMe disks directly Before this release there were two ways to configure a NVMe disk for a domain. The first was using <disk/> with the <source/> pointing to the /dev/nvmeXXXX. The other was using PCI assignment via <hostdev/> element. Both have their disadvantages: the former adds latency of file system and block layers of the host kernel, the latter prohibits domain migration. In this release the third way of configuring NVMe disk is added which combines the advantages and drops disadvantages of the previous two ways. It's accessible via <disk type='nvme'/>. Removed features: - 'phyp' Power Hypervisor driver removed The 'phyp' Power Hypervisor driver has not seen active development since 2011 and does not seem to have any real world usage. It has now been removed. Improvements: - qemu: xz save image compression is faster When using the xz format to compressed virtual machine saved state images, the "-3" compression level preset is now used. This results in slightly larger files, but with a massively reduced time to compress. The xz format offers the best compression level for saved state images, albeit still with the slowest running time. For the fastest possible running time, at cost of the larest compressed size, lzop should be used. - domain: Improve job stat handling It is now possible to retrieve stats for completed and failed jobs. - qemu: Don't hold monitor and agent job at the same time Before this change, a malicious (or buggy) qemu-guest-agent running in the guest could make other libvirt APIs unavailable for an unbounded amount of time. Bug fixes: - qemu: Report error if backing image format is not specified explicitly For a long time libvirt was assuming that a backing file is RAW when the format was not specified. This didn't pose a problem until blockdev support was enabled in last release. Libvirt now requires that the format is specified in the image metadata or domain XML and the VM will refuse to start otherwise. Additionally the error message now links to the knowledge base which summarizes how to fix the images. - qemu: Fix non-shared storage migration over NBD - qemu: Generate a single MAC address for hotplugged network devices Since libvirt 4.6.0, when hotplugging a network device that didn't have a MAC address already assigned by the user, two separate addresses would be generated: one for the live configuration, which would show up immediately, and one for the inactive configuration, which would show up after the first reboot. This situation was clearly undesirable, so a single MAC address is now generated and used both for the live configuration and the inactive one. thanks everybody who helped on this release, with reports, fixes, reviews, ideas, documentation, etc ... Enjoy the release, next one will be scheduled at the end of February ! Daniel -- Daniel Veillard | Red Hat Developers Tools http://developer.redhat.com/ veillard(a)redhat.com | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/ http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library http://libvirt.org/

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[Libvirt-announce] Entering freeze for 6.0.0
by Daniel Veillard 13 Jan '20

13 Jan '20

I just tagged it RC1 in git, and pushed signed tarball and source rpm to the usual place: https://libvirt.org/sources/ Looks fine in my very limited testing, ci seems mostly green (though I sometimes wonder how reliable that is) so looks we should be fine, but please give it some testing ! If everything goes smoothly, goal is to make rc2 on Monday and then push the release on the 15th , in the meantime, please give it a try ! thanks, Daniel -- Daniel Veillard | Red Hat Developers Tools http://developer.redhat.com/ veillard(a)redhat.com | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/ http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library http://libvirt.org/

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[Libvirt-announce] Release of libvirt-5.10.0
by Daniel Veillard 02 Dec '19

02 Dec '19

This is landing more or less on time :-) I just tagged it in git, and pushed signed tarball and source rpm to the usual place: https://libvirt.org/sources/ I also made a release for the Python bindings you can find at https://libvirt.org/sources/python/ I had to do a bit of workaround since virschematest failes on my machine this could be related to my latest release of libxml2 or another problem I didn't really had time to find out why (changes in RelaxNG implementation likely culprits). This release includes relatively larse set of changes, notably it now relies on glib and removes the Perl dependency: New features: - qemu: Introduce support for ARM CPU features The only features supported at the moment are SVE vector lengths, which were introduced in QEMU 4.2.0. - qemu: Support boot display for GPU mediated devices Until now, GPU mediated devices generally did not show any output until the guest OS had initialized the vGPU. By specifying the ramfb attribute, QEMU can be configured to use ramfb as a boot display for the device: this allows for display of firmware messages, boot loader menu, and other output before the guest OS has initialized the vGPU. - Add API to change the response timeout for guest agent commands By default, when a command is sent to the guest agent, libvirt waits forever for a response from the guest agent. If the guest is unresponsive for any reason, this can block the calling thread indefinitely. By setting a custom timeout using virDomainAgentSetResponseTimeout(), API users can change this behavior. Improvements: - Devices CGroup v2 support Libvirt supported all controllers of CGroup v2 but the devices controller which is implemented in this release. - Cold plug of sound device The QEMU driver now can handle cold plug of <sound/> devices. - Probe for default CPU types With QEMU 4.2.0 we can probe for the default CPU model used by QEMU for a particular machine type and store it in the domain XML. This way the chosen CPU model is more visible to users and libvirt will make sure the guest will see the exact same CPU after migration. - Adaptation to qemu's blockdev QEMU introduced a new way of specifying disks on the command line which enables fine-grained control over the block stack. Libvirt has adapted to this. Refactors: - More GLib integration More patches were merged that replace our internal functions with GLib ones. Also some effort was invested in replacing gnulib modules with GLib functions. - Rewrite of Perl scripts into Python Libvirt used Perl scripts to check for coding style, generate some code and things like that. To bring the number of languages used down, these scripts were rewritten into Python. Bug fixes: - Warn verbosely if using old loader:nvram pairs Some distributions still use --with-loader-nvram or nvram variable in qemu.conf. This is now discouraged in favour of FW descriptors. However, instead of silently ignoring user's config, libvirt warns if outdated config is detected. - Drop pconfig from Icelake-Server CPU model The pconfig feature was enabled in QEMU by accident in 3.1.0. All other newer versions do not support it and it was removed from the Icelake-Server CPU model in QEMU. - Wait longer for device removal confirmation on PPC64 After sending device hot unplug request to QEMU, libvirt waits up to 5 seconds for qemu to confirm the device removal. On some architectures (like PPC64) this can take longer time and libvirt now reflects that. - Forcibly create nodes in domain's namespace The QEMU driver starts a domain in a namepsace with private /dev and creates only those nodes there which the domain is configured to have. However, it may have happened that if a node changed its minor number this change wasn't propagated to the namespace. - Various AppArmor bugfixes The AppArmor driver now knows how to handle <shmem/> devices and also snapshotting more disks at once. - Improved video model autoselection If a graphics device was added to XML that had no video device, libvirt automatically added a video device which was always of type 'cirrus' on x86_64, even if the underlying qemu didn't support cirrus. Libvirt now bases the decision on qemu's capabilities. Thanks everybody who contributed to this release, with report, patches, docs, reviews, localization, etc ... Like previous years the the next release 6.0.0 will be mid-January as the end of the year generates serious slowdown and February is short. So enjoy the release until next year's one :-) Daniel -- Daniel Veillard | Red Hat Developers Tools http://developer.redhat.com/ veillard(a)redhat.com | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/ http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library http://libvirt.org/

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