FWN/Issue205

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 205 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 205 for the week ending December 6, 2009. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

Welcome to the post-FUDCon Toronto 2009 issue of Fedora Weekly News! In this issue, details on the various Fedora elections and announcement of the Fedora 13 release name, as well as news of the new Bugzilla 3.4 public beta availability. In news from the Fedora Planet, details on why Chromium is not packaged for Fedora, an upcoming Gnome Color Manager release, a guide to theming Plymouth, and much more! Updates from FUDCon Toronto and work towards Fedora 13 from the Marketing beat. In news from Ambassadors, a report on a F12 event in Nicaragua. Translation brings us news of an upcoming outage for translate.fedoraproject.org and details related to this, a draft Fedora 13 schedule, and new Localization team members. From the Design team, brainstorming on the Goddard theme, and a new mailing list for the Echo icon set. Security Advisories brings us up to date on patches for Fedora 10, 11 and 12. The Virtualization beat wraps up this issue, with details on a Red Hat Virtualization online event on 12/9, details on a new virt-manager release. Enjoy this issue of FWN!

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FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson

was not running even though it was enabled with chkconfig. After starting more guests,  was found to be running.

Dan Kenigsberg added the follwing explaination to the KSM feature page "Fedora's kvm comes with 2 services controlling the behavior of . One, simply called , is just a nice means to start and stop ksm's kernel thread. The other, called  , controls the first service and tunes its parameters according to the memory stress that is generated by KVM virtual machines.   may stop   service alltogether, if memory is not in need. Later, if   senses that memory stress has risen, it will fire up   again."

Soon after the explaination, Dan posted a patch which will cause  to log any   state changes. This patch will soon be available in an update.

KSM was also recently covered in FWN 200.

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

New virt-manager Features:
 * VM Migration wizard, exposing various migration options
 * Enumerate CDROM and bridge devices on remote connections
 * Can once again list multiple graphs in the manager window (Jon Nordby)
 * Support disabling dhcp (Michal Novotny), and specifying 'routed' type for new virtual networks
 * Support storage pool source enumeration for LVM, NFS, and SCSI
 * Allow changing VM ACPI, APIC, clock offset, individual vcpu pinning, and video model (vga, cirrus, etc.)
 * Many improvements and bugfixes

New virtinst Features:
 * virt-install now attempts --os-variant detection by default. This can be disabled with '--os-variant none' (distro detection currently only works for URL installs)
 * New --disk option 'format', for creating image disks formats such as qcow2 or vmdk
 * Many improvements and bugfixes

"Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release through testing, bug reporting, submitting patches, and otherwise sending in feedback!"

Also see coverage of the release on linux-kvm.com. Version 0.8.0 of  was announced on July 28th, 2009.