FWN/Issue182

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 182 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 182 for the week ending June 28, 2009.

Here are a few highlights from this week's issue. Announcements starts us off with updates on recent Fedora elections. Hot on the heels of the release of Fedora 11, the codename for Fedora 12 has already been chosen -- read inside for details. From the Fedora Planet, lots of great updates from the recent FUDCon in Berlin, as well as many updates from Fedora contributors. In Ambassador news, details from the recent Fedora 11 launch party from the NaLUG (Napoli GNU/Linux Users Group). In Quality Assurance news, many updates on Fedora 12 development, including discussion of improving debugging procedure pages, rawhide acceptance plan, bugzapper updates, and much more. Much interesting discussion in the Design beat this week on thinking around themes for Fedora 12 based on the release name. In Security Advisories, we're brought up to date with this week's software patches for Fedora 9, 10 and 11. This week's issue rounds out with updates from virtualization activities, with detail work on a libguestfs 'Super-minimized Appliance', VMWare ESX driver status, and much more! Enjoy!

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FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson

, "The normal appliance is a self-contained Linux operating system, based on the Fedora/RHEL/CentOS Linux distro. So it contains a complete copy of all the libraries and programs needed, like kernel, libc, bash, coreutils etc etc."

"The supermin appliance removes the kernel and all the executable libraries and programs from the appliance. That just leaves a skeleton of config files and some data files, which is obviously massively smaller than the normal appliance.  At runtime we rebuild the appliance on-the-fly from the libraries and programs on the host (eg. pulling in the real /lib/libc.so, the real /bin/bash etc.)"

"The new appliance is a mere 500K, so  RPMs will be a lot smaller.  Of course that just means they will have many more dependencies, so the amount pulled down will be the same or greater."

command through a command on the host. The canonical example is:

> hexdump /bin/ls | less

Another example, looking for root backdoors in the password file:

> cat /etc/passwd | awk -F: '$3 == 0 { print }' | grep -v ^root:

Anything right of the first pipe symbol gets passed to the local shell, thus expansion, redirection and so on work on that."

by hand appeared to work. But virsh start produced an error: libvirtd: 15:44:55.459: warning : pciTrySecondaryBusReset:483 : Other devices on bus with 0000:05:01.0, not doing bus reset

Daniel Berrange recalled "what  is complaining about is that there are other devices in the PCI bus which are not associated with this guest, and thus there is no way to safely reset the device you are trying to assign, without endangering the host OS or other guest OS."

Adding "when you launch QEMU manually there is no checking for whether the PCI devices are in use by other guests, or by the host OS. So while it may launch QEMU, it is not running safely, and eg, if your guest OS does a PCI bus reset it could kill/harm your host OS."

PCI device passthrough is a new feature in Fedora 11.

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Matthias is currently "working on the VMX config to domain XML mapping for dump/create XML" using the VMware Infrastructure API.