FWN/Issue184

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 184 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 184 for the week ending July 12, 2009.

Here are a few highlights from this week's issue. This past week marked the end of life for Fedora 9, and the launch of a new logging tool to help facilitate reporting for Fedora IRC meetings. In news from the Fedora Planet, an overview of the development changes for Fedora 12, and several posts around Mono in light of Microsoft's recent Community Promise. In Ambassador news, coverage of recent Fedora release events in Vancouver, Washington, Malaysia and India. In Translation news, a new Fedora 11 Users' Guide is now available in Bosnian, changes in Transfix, and new members of the Fedora Localization Project. In Design news, details on a new Gallery test instance for development of in-process works by the Art Team. Also some new wallpapers, and more theming discussion around Fedora 12 'Constantine.' The issue rounds out with news from virtualization-related efforts, including news of more device support in virt-manager, announcement of a new list for discussion of "libguestfs/guestfish/virt-inspector discussion/development." These are but a sampling of this week's Fedora Weekly News -- we hope you enjoy it!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list@redhat.com

FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson

mailing list. Not everyone was quite so optimistic however.

Michael DeHaan reminded us that only the core language and libraries are covered under the promise, and notably absent are some of the components that would make it useful including Windows Forms and ADO. Michael added "My long held theory is that mono was never to be considered a legal threat, it is a tool to be used in a strategy of erosion … insert a compelling technology, then provide a migration path by adding on proprietary extensions. It erodes Linux and it erodes OSS… and advocacy for it, even in purely legal/ethical ways, using just the free bits, and so forth, help enhance that position and acceptability."

Alex Hudson pointed out that "this is going to have a surprisingly negative effect within the community, however. It validates the arguments of people worried about Mono, and this proposed split of Mono into “Standard bits covered by MCP” and “Other bits not covered by MCP” is actually going to fuel the flames: inevitably, people will assume the non-MCP bits are a total patent mine-field, no matter what is actually in that area. Parts that people are quite happily shipping right now - such as ASP.net - will be targetted next by people “anti” Mono. And for the parts covered by MCP; well, I expect not much to change: certainly, it’s not likely to convert many people to Mono."

David Woodhouse shared an amusing (true) story about trying to recover the cost of Windows Vista, from a brand new laptop.

Michael DeHaan trialed Ubuntu Netbook Remix on a netbook and found a number of areas where Fedora may be able to improve its user experience.

Vincent Danen discussed the idea of "responsible disclosure" in response to rumors of a mysterious OpenSSH 0-day exploit floating around the internet.

Mohd Izhar Firdaus Ismail posted an event report (and photos!) from a Fedora 11 Release Event held by the Fedora Malaysia team.

Chitlesh Goorah announced that the Fedora Electronic Lab will be switching the default desktop from KDE to Gnome.

Scott Williams built a set of RPMs containing drivers for some ATI Radeon HD video cards, from a new experimental branch that contains 3D support. "You will need both the driver and the mesa package to enjoy all the 3d stuffs. Again, experimental – use at your own risk."

. That may come in handy for the F12 Hostinfo feature.

disables ACPI and APIC for Windows XP guests. Adding, that it seems "that Windows XP is working fine with acpi/apic enabled which has the immediate advantage that poweroff via ACPI works as expected. So does it make sense to handle winxp the same win2k3?". Windows 2003 guests have ACPI enabled.

Pasi Kärkkäinen went to the xen-devel list and confirmed and relayed "Keir Fraser replied that ACPI with Windows has been working properly at least since Xen 3.1.0 days". Pasi then updated the Xen wiki page.

/ discussion/development".

The current release is now 1.0.57, but Richard is so fast that may change by the time you read this.

Recent new features:
 * - like 'df' for virtual machines
 * New Perl library called Sys::Guestfs::Lib
 * Now available for EPEL
 * Tab completion in guestfish now completes files and devices
 * Big change to the code generator
 * Lots more regression tests
 * guestfish commands: time, glob, more, less
 * new commands: readdir, mknod*, umask, du, df*, head*, tail*, wc*, mkdtemp, scrub, sh, sh-lines.
 * Debian native (debootstrap, debirf) support

See previous release announcement for 1.0.14 in FWN#179 and be sure to see the project homepage for extensive usage examples.

0.6.4 was released on May 29. Daniel Veillard is "shooting for a slightly smaller development cycle, in order to be able to push the next version in time for Fedora 12 Beta, this means a new release at the end of July, so only a bit more than a couple of weeks for pushing the changes, I really hope we will be able to include a first version of the ESX driver and Power Hyprvisor, if it's the case I think it will be worth bumping the release name to 0.7.0."

working repos to the world. The master upstream repository for  does not change ".

. A partial list of those things would include:"


 * In-depth multipath config management
 * Hardware lifecycle management (power-off, reboot, etc.)
 * HA configuration

Hugh then asked "why *not* expand the scope of to be a one-stop shop for managing a node? Is there a really good reason it shouldn't have the remaining capabilities   users want?"

Daniel Berrange replied "This is essentially suggesting that  become a general purpose RPC layer for all remote management tasks. At which point you have just re-invented QPid/AMQP or CIM or any number of other general purpose message buses.   has a core well defined goal:"
 * Provide a remote proxy for  API calls

"If you want todo anything more than that you should be considering an alternative remote management system. We already have 2 good ones to choose from supported with "
 * QPid/AMQP, with  agent + your own custom agents
 * CIM, with libvirt-CIM + your own custom CIM providers

"Furthermore, adding more plugins to  means we will never be able to reduce its privileges to an acceptable level, because we'll never know what capabilities the plugins may want."

Hugh countered "given a  daemon on the node that handles RPC over QMF (for example), is there not some value in having   expose a consistent API for the operations people want to do on a host regardless of whether they have directly to do with managing a virtual machine or not?"

Daniel Berrange didn't "really see any value in that" "You're just putting in another abstraction layer where none need exist. Just have whatever QMF agent you write talk directly to the thing you need to manage."

Hugh "I will note that when I presented the large client with the option of QMF talking to multiple agents on the node but exposing (effectively) a single API and a single connection, they seemed much happier. So perhaps the right way to attack this is with the daemon we are currently working on."

Daniel Veillard was "a bit synpathetic to the suggestion though." "I think  API should help run those virtualization nodes, I would not open the gate like completely, but if we could provide all APIs needed to manage the node on a day by day basis  then I think this is not really beyond our scope. I think that netcf(FWN#170 ) is an example of such API where we start to add admin services for the purpose of running virtualization. Things like rebooting or shutting down the node would fit in this, maybe editing a drive partition too."

"Basically if we take the idea of a stripped down Node used only for virtualization, then except for operations which are first time setup options or maintainance, I think we should try to cover the requirements of normal operations of that node. To some extend that means we would step on the toes of CIM, but we would stick to a subset that's sure."

Storage cloning for LVM and Disk backends
Cole Robinson submitted a patch series which "implements cloning for LVM and disk backends. Most of the functionality is already here, it just needed some reorganization to be accessible for every backend."

"I verified the following scenarios produced a bootable image:"
 * Clone within a disk pool
 * Clone within a logical pool
 * Clone a raw file to a disk pool
 * Clone a disk pool to a logical pool

Fedora-Xen List
This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-xen list.

Xen dom0 Forward Ported to Latest Kernel
Previously, Xen dom0 support in Fedora was provided by forward porting the Xensource patches from kernel 2.6.18 to the version found in the Fedora release at the time. This consumed developer resources and led to separate and  packages for a time. As of Fedora 9 this practice was deamed untenable, and support for hosting Xen guests was dropped from Fedora.

Work has since focused on creating a paravirt operations dom0 kernel based on the most recent upstream vanilla kernel. This work is incomplete and not expected to be done before F12 or even F13. However, experimental dom0 kernels have been created for the adventurous.

Pasi Kärkkäinen tells us the Xen 2.6.18 patches have now been forward-ported to the current 2.6.29 and 2.6.30 kernel. "Forward-porting has been done by Novell for OpenSUSE. Novell also has a forward-port to 2.6.27 for SLES11."

The patches can be found here here and here.

Pasi added "These patches are still more stable and mature than the pv_ops dom0 code.. Also, these patches have the full Xen feature set (pv_ops still lacks some features)."

More history is avilable.