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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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[Libvirt-announce] Entering freeze for libvirt 5.10.0
by Daniel Veillard 28 Nov '19

28 Nov '19

As planned this is now tagged in git head and signed source tarball and rpm are available at the usual place: https://libvirt.org/sources/ there is a few weirdness on CI, some apparently related to freebsd, others to python and go bindings, worth having a look, some are broken for a while now. Otherwise this passes my very minimal testing, but don't rely on this ! I plan on making a RC2 for Thanksgiving, and if everything looks fine push the final release next Monday. Please make sure we have the docs in the news file :-) 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] ANNOUNCE: libvirt-glib release 3.0.0
by Daniel P. Berrangé 26 Nov '19

26 Nov '19

I am pleased to announce that a new release of the libvirt-glib package, version 3.0.0, is now available from https://libvirt.org/sources/glib/ The packages are GPG signed with Key fingerprint: DAF3 A6FD B26B 6291 2D0E 8E3F BE86 EBB4 1510 4FDF (4096R) Changes in this release: * Add support for bochs video device * Add API to query firmware config * Improve testing coverage * Validate min/max glib API versions in use * Remove deprecated G_PARAM_PRIVATE * Fix docs build linking problems * Convert python demos to be python 3 compatible & use modern best practice for pyobject introspection bindings * Add API to query domain capaibilities * Refresh translations * Simplify build process for handling translations * Fix some memory leaks * Add API for setting storage volume features Thanks to everyone who contributed to this new release through testing, patches, bug reports, translations and more. Regards, Daniel -- |: https://berrange.com -o- https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :| |: https://libvirt.org -o- https://fstop138.berrange.com :| |: https://entangle-photo.org -o- https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :|

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[Libvirt-announce] Availability of libvirt 5.9.0
by Daniel Veillard 06 Nov '19

06 Nov '19

With a bit of delay I finally made the release today, it's available as signed tarball and source rpms from the usual place: https://libvirt.org/sources/ I also pushed a python release which is virtually identical to 5.8.0 one but you can find it at https://libvirt.org/sources/python/ You can start to see in this release some of the long term changes which were raised last month: Packaging changes - Start linking against GLib and using its features Up until now, libvirt has been dealing with platform portability and the lack of certain features in libc by using gnulib and implementing its own functions and data structures respectively; going forward, it will prefer the facilities offered by GLib instead. - Stop distributing generated documentation Most downstreams already patch the libvirt source to some extent, so this change will probably not affect them. - Rewrite several Perl scripts in Python Phasing out Perl usage is part of the project strategy. New features - qemu: Introduce a new video model of type 'ramfb' Introduce a new video model type to the domain XML that supports the ramfb standalone device in qemu. - qemu: Implement the ccf-assist pSeries feature Users can now decide whether ccf-assist (Count Cache Flush Assist) support should be available to pSeries guests. - Xen: Support specifying ACPI firmware path The libxl driver now supports specifying an ACPI firmware path using the acpi element. - qemu: Support specifying resolution for video devices Removed features - logging: Drop support for including stack traces This feature was intended to aid debugging, but in practice it resulted in logs that were too verbose to be useful and also resulted in a significant performance penalty. Improvements - qemu: Implement CPU comparison/baseline on s390x This functionality has been historically limited to x86_64, but it's now available on s390x too. Bug fixes - lib: autostart objects exactly once If libvirtd or any of the sub-daemons is started with socket activation then objects might be autostarted more than once. For instance, if a domain under qemu:///session URI is mark as autostarted and the session daemon is started then the domain is started with it. If user shuts the domain down and the session daemon is started again, the user's wish to keep the domain shut off is ignored and the domain is autostarted again. This is now fixed. - qemu: Properly advertise bochs-display availability Support for bochs-display was introduced in libvirt 5.6.0, but until now the model was not listed in the domain capabilities. - security: Don't remember labels for TPM devices Due to the way they're implemented in the kernel, trying to remember labels for TPM devices makes it impossible to use them. - security: Properly rollback after failure in a stacked driver When multiple security drivers are involved, failure in one of them would result in only the corresponding changes being rolled back, leaving the ones performed by drivers that had been activated earlier in place. All changes are rolled back now. - Fix build with musl libc - Improve compatibility with non-bash shells thanks everybody who helped with this release, next in a month ! Enjoy :-) 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 libvirt 5.9.0
by Daniel Veillard 31 Oct '19

31 Oct '19

We are getting close to the end of the month, a lot of developers are at KVM Forum in Lyon, so starting the release process now looks a good idea. I have tagged the RC1 in git and pushed signed tarball and source rpm to the usual place: https://libvirt.org/sources/ Seems to work in my limited testing, the Ci is almost all green https://ci.centos.org/view/libvirt/ so things looks good in my perspective. Please give it a try, I will try to push RC2 on Wednesday, and based on feedback roll the release on Friday or during the week-end, thanks in advance, 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-5.8.0
by Daniel Veillard 05 Oct '19

05 Oct '19

So it's out, a bit late but better than never, without release notes but after all everything is described in the commits, so here is a very raw 5.8.0 release, it's tagged in git and signed sources and tarball are available at the usual place: https://libvirt.org/sources/ I also made python binding release that you can find at: https://libvirt.org/sources/python So the only thing listed in the release notes is Removed features: - Remove xenapi driver The xenapi driver is removed since it has not received any significant development since its initial contribution nine years ago and has no known user base. Glancing at the commit list, there is a lot of refactoring going on which I assume don't have any visible user impact. I would suggest users look at the new development strategy document, https://libvirt.org/strategy.html TBH since I started the project 14 or so years ago the core assumption have been kept, but this indicates willingness to change some of the directions by the current group of developers, one of the key point is articulated there: "There is thus a desire to make use of either Rust or Go, or a combination of both, to incrementally replace existing use of C, and also for greenfield development." So if anybody mourns the absence of the release note for 5.8.0, I suggest to instead takes the couple of minutes it takes to read the above page, that will be well invested time ! Enjoy the release ! 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 libvirt-5.8.0
by Daniel Veillard 03 Oct '19

03 Oct '19

per previous mail, apologies, I totally forgot. It's tagged in git, I have pushed RC1 signed tarball and source rpm to the usual place at: https://libvirt.org/sources/ I will reckon my testing was even more minimal than usual, I will just say it built for me ! https://ci.centos.org/view/libvirt/ is green with a small exception, so apparently it's not too broken, but please give it a try ! I will push rc2 on Thursday, and if everything is fine will do the release on Saturday, a bit late but hopefully not a big deal ! 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 5.7.0
by Daniel Veillard 03 Sep '19

03 Sep '19

A few hours ago I tagged the release in git and pushed the signed tarball and source rpm to the usual place: https://libvirt.org/sources/ I also tagged a release of the python bindings which you can find at https://libvirt.org/sources/python/ This is a balanced release with new features, improvements and bug fixes, also note some deprecation for KVM assignment support and for build with older versions of libxml2. New features: - qemu: Support Direct Mode for Hyper-V Synthetic timers The QEMU driver now supports Direct Mode for Hyper-V Synthetic timers for Hyper-V guests. - lib: Add virDomainGetGuestInfo() This API is intended to aggregate several guest agent information queries and is inspired by stats API virDomainListGetStats(). It is anticipated that this information will be provided by a guest agent running within the domain. It's exposed as virsh guestinfo. - Split libvirtd into separate daemons The big monolithic libvirtd daemon can now be replaced by smaller per-driver daemons. Distributions can chose if they want the former or the latter. The libvirtd is still kept around for backwards compatibility. Removed features: - Remove KVM assignment support The KVM style of PCI device assignment was removed from the kernel in version 4.12.0 after being deprecated since 4.2.0. Libvirt defaults to VFIO for a long time. Remove support for KVM device assignment from libvirt too. - libxml: min required libxml is now 2.9.1 Support for building with libxml versions older than 2.9.1 has been dropped. Improvements: - virsh: Support setting bandwidth in migrate subcommand In addition to postcopy bandwidth, the virsh migrate subcommand now supports specifying precopy bandwidth with the --bandwidth parameter. - libxl: Implement domain metadata getter/setter The libxl driver now supports virDomainGetMetadata() and virDomainSetMetadata() APIs. - test driver: Expand API coverage Additional APIs have been implemented in the test driver. - Report RNG device in domain capabilities XML Libvirt now reports if RNG devices are supported by the underlying hypervisor in the domain capabilities XML. - Stop linking virt-login-shell and NSS plugins with libvirt.so In order to allow libvirt to abort on out of memory, we need to stop linking libvirt.so to virt-login-shell or the NSS plugins where we don't want to abort. This change also resulted in smaller binaries and libraries. - qemu: Allow migration with disk cache on When QEMU supports flushing caches at the end of migration, we can safely allow migration even if disk/driver/@cache is neither none nor directsync. Bug fixes: - Various security label remembering fixes In the previous release libvirt introduced remembering of original owners and SELinux labels on files. However, the feature did not work properly with snapshots, on migrations or on network filesystems. This is now fixed. - Allow greater PCI domain numbers Libvirt used to require PCI domain number to be not greater than 0xFFFF. The code was changed to allow 32 bits long numbers. - Various D-Bus fixes When D-Bus is not available, libvirt was reporting random errors. These are now gone. - Prefer read-only opening of PCI config files When enumerating PCI bus, libvirt opens config files under sysfs mount and parses them to learn various aspects of the device (e.g. its capabilities). Only in a very limited number of cases it is actually writing into the file. However, it used to open the file also for writing even if it was only reading from it. - Fix AppArmor profile Since the 5.6.0 release, libvirt uses procfs to learn the list of opened file descriptors when spawning a command. However, our AppArmor profile was not allowing such access. - Don't block storage driver when starting or building a pool Starting or building a storage pool can take a long time to finish. During this time the storage driver was blocked and thus no other API involving the storage driver could run. This is now fixed. Thanks everybody who helped for this release, be it with patches, reviews, bug reports, docs, etc... Enjoy the release ! 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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