FWN/Issue165

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 165 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 165 for the week ending March 1, 2009.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue165

In this week's issue, in announcements we're reminded about this month's Fedora Board meeting and updates on the Fedora 11 feature freeze and updates on upcoming Fedora events. News from the Fedora Planet includes summer internship opportunities at Red Hat, an interview with Matt Domsch in Red Hat Magazine, and reports from Fedora events in Egypt and India. In Ambassador news, many reports from the recent Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) meeting, and another update from a Fedora install fest in Texas. In the QA beat, updates from Fedora 11 testing and weekly planning, as well as helping new contributors with the BugZapper team. Art work brings more updates on the Echo icon theme and Fedora 11. In security news, updates on this week's fixes for Fedora 9 and 10, and ongoing conversation on the security of open and closed source systems. Finally, the issue wraps up with updates on Fedora 11 virtualization features, dom0 kernel experimentation, and some Q&A on Libvirt, VirtIO, KVM, and Xen.

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

"New VM" wizard.

Red Hat Magazine interviewed Matt Domsch to discuss the Fedora Mirror network.

Mark J. Wielaard explained a new feature in  0.9 that allows you to "collect data from any variable in scope at a probe point using the DWARF debug info. You can even dereference pointers, access struct members, array elements, etc."

and. The translated versions of these files are also available on the fedoraproject.org wiki

specific assumptions and the state of /  at the time: many of those assumptions don't apply today, or require a bit more thought since we now support both and  based VMs." See the post for full details on the long list of changes and screenshots.

.

guests.

"The default mouse for KVM guests is a PS/2 mouse. This causes pain for users because it only works with relative coordinates, which means we are forced to grab the mouse pointer in the VNC client.

KVM can emulate a USB graphics tablet which works in absolute coordinate mode, and thus gives flawless mouse motion tracking without needing any grab in the client."

USB tablet will now be used by default in F11.

and  merge, Daniel P. Berrange explained that "The   upstream release will be so close to the feature freeze, that we don't want to risk causing   regressions by trying to then merge the two. Hopefully come F12, more of the   bits will be in   mainline, so work we need todo to merge would be minimal."

has gotten as far as booting in single user mode.

,,  , and. Daniel P. Berrange took the time to provide a detailed response to each of Patrick's questions. A selection follows.


 * What is the difference between  and  ? "  provides a API for the host OS, allowing management of virtual machines, storage, networking, host devices, etc."

is basically providing paravirtualized device drivers between guest and host, and has several aspects
 * A generic infrastructure layer in guest kernel for writing device drivers that talk to the host
 * A generic host<->guest data transport running as a PCI device
 * A generic host<->guest data transport using a ring buffer
 * Guest implementations for paravirt network, disk & memory balloon drivers
 * QEMU host backends for network, disk & memory balloon drivers"


 * Why must hypervisor developers ( and  ) develop drivers each time there are new devices? "The   infrastructure is intended to provide generic drivers that can be used on any hypervisor. Currently supports   and  .   has its own device drivers because they were developed years ago outside the context of the Linux kernel community just for Xen's needs."

"VirtIO is currently only supported for KVM and LGuest. It could in theory be implemented for Xen too, but its not clear if it is worth the effort."
 * Can we use  with  ?

client and a  guest. The thread was long with a lot of back and forth touching on windows clients, certificate setup, and.

Daniel P. Berrange pointed out 's  documentation and described the Fedora 11 feature VirtVNCAuth which dovetails with to "Define a mapping of SASL authentication into the VNC protocol, and implement it for QEMU and GTK-VNC, providing strongly authenticated, securely encrypted remote access of virtual guest consoles."

support to. Most of the functionality is complete, but Pritesh sought help with working out the domain XML format.

Run QEMU Guests Within a CGroup
Daniel P. Berrange posted a proof of concept patch set with this explanation.

"Recent Linux kernels have a new concept of 'CGroups' which is a way to group tasks on the system and apply policy to them as a whole. We already use this in the LXC container driver(FWN#146 ), to control total memory usage of things running within a container.

This patch series is a proof of concept to make use of CGroups in the QEMU driver. The idea is that we have a 3 level cgroup hierarchy


 * Top level; contains the libvirtd daemon itself
 * 2nd level: one per libvirt driver, but dos not contain any processes.
 * 3rd level: one per guest VM. Contains the QEMU process

The host admin can do control on the top level and 2nd level to set an overall system policy. libvirt will then provide APIs / capabilities to control individual VMs policy."