FWN/Issue161

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 161 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 161 for the week ending February 1, 2009.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue161

This week's FWN goodness offers a very special update from the Fonts SIG to bring us up to date on their work leading up to Fedora 11. You may also notice that we are tweaking the wiki formatting to take advantage of the cite module and other features in MediaWiki, and employing User: references for links to named Fedora folk. We'd love to hear your feedback on these changes. Also in this week's intrepid issue details on the upcoming Fedora monthly public meeting, updates on upcoming events with a Fedora presence, and news updates from around the Fedora Planet. In Developments, details on a slight delay to F11 Alpha and Electronic Automation Tools updates. Translation news brings updates from the latest FLP meeting and website translation updates, along with more Fedora 11 plans. A couple brief updates from the Infrastructure Team, including discussion of possible automation of fedora hosted requests. The Artwork beat paints a lovely picture with details on Fedora 11 visual details, and we're brought up to date with the latest security advisories for Fedora 9 and 10. The issue completes with updates from the various virtualization projects, including details on a new libvirt and virt-manager, as well as meaty updates on the Fedora Xen list. Enjoy, everyone!

We are currently looking for a new writer to cover the Fedora Ambassadors for FWN. The work chiefly involves summarizing each's week's traffic on the Fedora Ambassadors' list, and is likely a time committment of perhaps one hour per week.

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, Oisin Feeley, Huzaifa Sidhpurwala

Announcements
In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project.

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/

Contributing Writer: Max Spevack

Fedora Board Meeting
Paul Frields wrote that "the Board is holding its monthly public meeting on Tuesday, 3 February 2009, at 1900 UTC on IRC Freenode."


 * Join #fedora-board-meeting to see the Board's conversation. This channel is read-only for non-Board members.


 * Join #fedora-board-public to discuss topics and post questions. This channel is read/write for everyone.

VNC server to support the multiple pointers on X over VNC, so there will be no more fighting over the mouse cursor when connecting into another computer.

Mark J. Wielaard wrote about what he does for a living at Red Hat, including a link to a LWN article that he wrote that provides a high-level overview of Systemtap.

John J. McDonough described some of the upcoming changes to the Fedora Docs project, including its leadership. Karsten Wade chimed in with some more details including some additional history.

Matthew Garrett discussed some of the issues associated with power management under Linux and how "to make it sufficiently useful and inobtrusive that manual configuration is almost never required."

Gary Benson shared, , , , a series of articles that he wrote about the internals of  and   (projects which extend   to let it run on new platforms without additional and often cumbersome low-level CPU-specific support).

Martin Sourada developed a set of scripts "which are intended to ease the life of echo-icon artist - they create new icons from template, are able to add icons/symlinks to echo icon theme and add manage their local git repository."

Matthew Daniels mused on the topic of "Social Responsibility" and getting technology out into people's hands everywhere and making all of this social hardware and software accessible.

Jonathan Roberts posted, some thoughts about how some of the upcoming major  changes might be able to handle things like locating information ("Ubiquitous Search") and saving information automatically.

Richard Hughes created a nice graphical UI front-end for.

Adam Williamson expressed some frustrations with the fact that the drivers for the Intel GMA 500 (Poulsbo) graphics chip (most notably used in the Dell Mini 12) don't seem to compile cleanly or integrate well with anything, and in fact only work on Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

John Palmier proposed "10 thoughts on what is needed for the Linux Desktop to win".

file for the GSynaptics utility to modify.

release date might slip due to some  bugs which manifested themselves late in his testing on some architectures. A later post suggested that installation using  was broken and that "[t]his likely means a slip, perhaps only a two day slip, of Alpha." More info to come either later this weekend or early next week. A bugzilla comment from Warren Togami on a side-effect of trying to fix this problem by reverting to an earlier  version warned "People should be aware that NFS as a server in F11 Alpha is broken. That is all." As of going to press on 2009-02-01 there was no further information available.

should be re-evaluated. A follow-on question was whether the minimum supported kernel version in  could be bumped to. Jakub held out the promise of potentially increased speed and decreased shared library sizes.

A problem raised by Kevin Kofler was that  builds would no longer be able to run on older   releases and that some VPSs would not be able to upgrade at all. Gerd Hoffman agreed : "We just can't make the huge jump from .9 to .29. We have to do it smaller steps, considering kernel versions at least in supported Fedora versions, maybe also latest RHEL."

Josh Boyer seemed to believe that the required mass rebuild with GCC-4.4 would be difficult but possible. Mike McGrath outlined the amount of work which would be needed.

See this same FWN#161 "Dropping Support for i586 Architecture" for a related discussion.

were able to reference count directories there could be a technological fix. Separately Richard W.M. Jones made a similar argument. Panu Matilainen seemed willing to move this task to the top of his queue if it were sufficiently important.

could be altered to allow it to reference upstream changelogs which could be pulled out by other tools. Panu Matilainen averred that while rpm was alterable Richard's proposed change would just dump the information into the rpm payload and it would thus not be available to users until after they had installed it. Further brainstorming seemed to run into various practical dead ends.

Subsequently Rahul published a draft guideline which fanned the flames back to life. Thorsten Leemhuis asked "Don't we have way [too] many guidelines and policies already? [...] Note that I don't disagree with the text that was proposed. My 2 cent: Put it as text into the wiki somewhere, write "best practices" on top of it (avoid the words "rules" and "guidelines") and add a link to the bodhi UI ("best practices for filling this box with information")." Rahul appeared to agree that this was the best course for the present and deferred to FESCo for the ultimate decision.

. He was concerned that FESCo had decided that packages in the OVM format were barred from Fedora on the grounds that there was no FLOSS tool which could use them although they were licensed acceptably.

Jef Spaleta explained that there were subtle problems in the discussion as "[OVM] is code of some sort. The problem is we don't have a compiler or interpreter that can process the instructions. In the context of Fedora its code that can't be used." Kevin Kofler supplied the appropriate guideline.

Kevin Fenzi expressed appreciation for Chitlesh's work on the Fedora Electronics Lab and asked if there was any use for OVM besides hooking it up with a non-Free simulator? Manuel Wolfshant argued that OVM "is interesting for a subset of the people interested in EDA" and that it should be provided for them. Horst von Brand disliked the idea of mirrors carrying such a little-used package around and suggested that Manuel could just set up his own repository.

statistics listed on the feature page suggest that there are only 130 i586 users.

Josh Boyer clarified that no decision had yet been made by FESCo and that a vote would take place next week.

setting which disables cursor blinking after a timeout. Josh Boyer worried about other desktop environments and vttys.

,, and. Start, stop, add or remove virtual devices, connect to a graphical or serial console, and see resource usage statistics for existing VMs on local or remote machines. Uses  as the backend management API.

New features:
 * 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.

[1] http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-January/msg00067.html

New Release virtinst 0.4.1
Cole Robinson announced[1] a new  release, version 0.4.1.

is a module that helps build and install  based virtual machines. Currently supports,   and   virtual machines. Package includes several command line utilities, including  (build and install new VMs) and   (clone an existing virtual machine).

New features:
 * 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

[1] http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-January/msg00068.html

Fedora Virtualization List
This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-virt list.

Fedora Virt Status Update
True to his word, Mark McLoughlin posted another weekly update on the status of virtualization development in Fedora. Some highlights included:


 * F11 Alpha Blockers - Workaround found for "unsynchronized TSC" issue which caused guests on certain hosts to hang or crash.
 * New release of coming very soon. It's out now.
 * The KVM PCI Device Assignment feature for F11 "received a very positive reception from FESCo", and "basic device assignment seems to be working."
 * "Related to PCI device assignment are Intel VT-d issues that have been reported recently. Basically, on some machines ... VT-d support is causing serious [problems] and, in one case, data loss."
 * New F11 feature page created for . "sVirt integrates SELinux with the Fedora virtualization stack".
 * New patches from Jeremy Fitzhardinge reduce the overhead of enabling paravirt_ops on bare-metal by 75% in testing.
 * Bug count climbed from 186 to 191.

isn't flavour of the month around here, but I assumed there were good reasons for that. Now, rather belatedly, I've found" that Red Hat acquired Qumranet and . (FWN #143)

Neil Thompson thought not. "Shafted?...I don't think so. We're just in a blip at the moment." Neil pointed out that "RHEL5, which has a number of years left, includes xen - I don't think Red Hat are going to mess their corporate clients around by removing it. The problem with F8 is that the people could no longer drag an obsolete (2.6.21)   around just for xen, and decided to concentrate on helping get it into the mainstream  .  This has taken longer than expected."

Jan ONDREJ was also concerned that, " is still not a replacement for paravirtualized machines and I think fully virtualized   will be slower like a paravirtualized XEN."

Richard W.M. Jones countered " is a great replacement for  . It's much easier to use for a start -- no more rebooting into a completely separate   hypervisor. As long as you have the   drivers in the guest, which is the default for all new Linux distros, performance is roughly the same."

Apropos to the topic, but on another list, Mark McLoughlin explained "Para-virtualization isn't always better.  uses full virtualization, meaning that it uses the processor's support for virtualization. This means you can run an unmodified guest OS on  . If you can modify the guest OS, then   does allow you to use paravirtualization for some performance sensitive operations - so e.g.  we've got , pv MMU and   devices. Don't get tied up in marketing terminology - try both and decide for yourself which works best for you."

Support for dom0 is targeted for  2.6.29, but the changelogs for the release candidates don't seem to indicate completion yet. Gerd Hoffmann confirmed that "...most of the dom0 stuff missed the boat. Some prelimary stuff might be in though..." adding that "The pv_ops/dom0 kernel has some not-yet debugged storage issues (disk controller either fails after a while or doesn't work at all), which is the major stumbling block right now."

Daniel P. Berrange, of Red Hat Engineering, detailed the history of  on Fedora and explained "while it is definitely unfortunate that we don't have a   Dom0 kernel in Fedora 9/10, we are *not* trying to shaft anyone & will re-introduce   Dom0 kernels to Fedora when they become available." ... "It [is] still hard to say just when these will be accepted upstream, but there is a semi-reasonable [chance] we'll be able to turn  Dom0 back on in Fedora 11 kernels."

on Fedora led to talk of migrating guests to. Fortunately, migrating a virtual machine from  to   is straight forward. Well, more or less.

Richard W.M. Jones explained "Install a recent Linux kernel in the guest, adjust the [libvirt] configuration file, and reboot." Alternatively, will enable running "the   PV guest unchanged (ie. without installing a new guest kernel)."


 * Ensure the guest is new enough to support   network drivers (  >= 2.6.25)
 * change the domain, , and fields - ' '
 * "tell the host to give the guest a  network card - change the NIC  "

Richard finally noted "For newly installed guests, recent anaconda just works everything out for you and puts the correct drivers into ." Mark McLoughlin provided the  command to build the appropriate   in existing guests: ' ' "You only need to do this once. After that, if a new kernel is installed while you're booted off a virtio disk, then mkinitrd will include the modules automatically."

Emre Erenoglu noted "You will also need to specify  on the   line and make sure your init script inside your   triggers the virtio drivers at boot so that the   are created."

Mark McLoughlin added a caveat. "the F9 x86_64 xen kernel didn't have support for running 32 bit binaries like grub, so the bootloader would never have been installed into the MBR. That works fine for pygrub, but not with KVM's real BIOS."

Also see this guide to converting to  drivers.

is a  toolkit to interact with the virtualization capabilities of recent versions of Linux (and other OSes).

New features:
 * thread safety of the API and event handling (Daniel Berrange)
 * allow QEmu domains to survive daemon restart (Guido Gunther)
 * extended logging capabilities
 * support copy-on-write storage volumes (Daniel Berrange)
 * support of storage cache control options for QEmu/KVM (Daniel Berrange)

Improvements:
 * driver infrastructure and locking (Daniel Berrange)
 * Test driver infrastructure (Daniel Berrange)
 * parallelism in the daemon and associated config (Daniel Berrange)
 * virsh help cleanups (Jim Meyering)
 * logrotate daemon logs (Guido Gunther)
 * more regression tests (Jim Meyering)
 * QEmu SDL graphics (Itamar Heim)
 * add --version flag to daemon (Dave Allan)
 * memory consumption cleanup (Dave Allan)
 * QEmu pid file and XML states for daemon restart (Guido Gunther)
 * gnulib updates (Jim Meyering and Dan Berrange)
 * PCI passthrough for KVM (Jason Krieg)
 * generic internal thread API (Daniel Berrange)
 * RHEL-5 specific Xen configure option and code (Markus Armbruster)
 * save domain state as string in status file (Guido Gunther)
 * add locking to all API entry points (Daniel Berrange)
 * new ref counting APIs (Daniel Berrange)
 * IP address for Xen bridges (John Levon)
 * driver format for disk file types (Daniel Berrange)
 * improve QEmu/KVM tun/tap performances (Mark McLoughlin)
 * enable floppies for Xen fully virt (John Levon)
 * support VNC password settings for QEmu/KVM (Daniel Berrange)
 * qemu driver version reporting (Daniel Berrange)

There were also dozens of cleanups, documentation enhancements, portability and bug fixes.