Virtualization News Archives

The second beta release of the Oracle's VM VirtualBox 4.3 software is now available. So far VirtualBox 4.3 isn't proving to be too incredibly interesting.

The KVM pull request was accepted on Wednesday for the Linux 3.12 kernel. This KVM pull has two major new features.

The popular open-source virt-manager utility for managing virtual machines (commonly Linux KVM instances) now has a user-interface for finally dealing with VM snapshots.

QEMU 1.6.0 has been released and with this open-source processor emulator commonly used with Linux KVM are a whole lot of new features and capabilities.

Last week the experimental Virgil project was unveiled as a way of exposing 3D/OpenGL guest acceleration support to KVM/QEMU virtualization users and with the drawing calls then being passed onto the host for processing by the GPU. Here's some more details.

The Xen Project, now under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation, has released the feature-bearing Xen 4.3.

Citrix has announced this week that XenServer 6.2 is now fully open-source software.

In continuation of my earlier Research Underway With QEMU 3D Support posting, Red Hat is indeed internally working on getting 3D-accelerated support up and running for virtual machines under QEMU.

Just three months after the exciting QEMU 1.4 release, QEMU 1.5 is now available with many exciting and new features for those using this open-source software in a virtualized world. There's the VFIO VGA pass-through support, USB 3.0 improvements, and much more.

After KVM virtualization was brought to ARM last year with the ARM Cortex-A15 SoCs supporting hardware virtualization, support for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) SoCs is being prepared.

From the OpenStack event taking place this week, Red Hat has announced RDO, which will serve as a new community-supported OpenStack distribution.

While KVM is generally the de facto open-source Linux virtualization method, the Linux Foundation has announced today it will be backing the Xen virtualization project in the form of hosting it as a new collaborative project.

After a QXL KMS DRM driver was finally published for improving the desktop virtualization experience with Red Hat's Linux virtualization stack in conjunction with SPICE on QEMU, a Gallium3D wrapper driver is now being talked about.

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates for Linux 3.9 are now known.

It was only in early December that QEMU 1.3 was released with a variety of improvements and now this weekend QEMU 1.4 is out. QEMU 1.4 packs in a number of exciting features for those using QEMU in conjunction with various virtualization platforms.

There's a lot of virtualization improvements coming to Xen 4.3 that will be released in the months ahead while when it comes to the Xen work directly within the Linux kernel, there's good stuff happening for Linux 3.9.

Xen 4.3 is expected to be released in June of this year. While the developers working on this virtualization platform are only half-way through its development cycle, they already have an impressive number of features that are coming into this next open-source release.

Red Hat may finally get to developing a KMS/DRM driver for QXL/SPICE to be used in conjunction with QXL for virtualization. This is a stepping-stone to eventually supporting SPICE 3D for allowing Red Hat virtual machines to tap hardware graphics acceleration support.

One of the major limitations of QEMU/KVM when it comes to Linux desktop virtualization is that it hasn't provided any form of support for graphics acceleration -- either by passing OpenGL calls onto the host for execution by the host's driver and graphics hardware or allowing guest VMs to tap directly the graphics card. Support for the latter feature continues to be developed and is close to becoming a working reality.

Xen Orchestra is an open-source project that gives a web-interface to the Xen virtualization platform via XCP and its API (XAPI).

VMware is still trying to push VMCI (the Virtual Machine Communication Interface) and VSOCK (VMCI Sockets) into the mainline Linux kernel. Fortunately, it looks like this virtualization code from the proprietary software vendor will make it into the Linux 3.9 kernel.

It's been two months since the last update to Oracle's cross-platform VirtualBox software but yesterday evening a new point release was made available that has a plethora of fixes and other minor improvements.

Here's a report on the state of KVM Nested Virtualization for Linux in dealing with multiple layers of virtualization.

QEMU 1.3.0 was released on Monday afternoon and supports a large number of new features for this open-source package that's common to the Linux virtualization stack.

Released on Monday was the "RC0" development version of QEMU 1.3 for the open-source processor emulator commonly used with the Linux KVM virtualization stack.

While there's usually always something to talk about with each new kernel release for the Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau DRM/KMS drivers, that isn't always the case for VMware's "vmwgfx" virtual GPU driver. This driver for exposing 3D acceleration to guest virtual machines on VMware's virtualization products does work quite well already, but the open-source developers have been recently working on a few improvements.

Within the forthcoming Linux 3.7 kernel there is support for Xen virtualization support on ARM when using a Cortex-A15 SoC. While not yet merged to mainline, KVM virtualization support for the ARM architecture is also coming about.

VMware developers continue to work on mainlining more of their Linux kernel code to support their virtualization platform in the name of improving the "out of the box" experience for Linux VM guests. The latest work has been on pushing forward VMCI and VSOCK for the mainline Linux kernel.

Xen virtualization support for the ARM architecture is now set to be pulled for the Linux 3.7 kernel.

The OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud computing platform has now released version 2012.2 Folsom.

Many Phoronix readers have been asking about VMware Fusion 5.0 benchmarks, so here are some numbers for those wondering about this closed-source virtualization product for running other operating systems atop Mac OS X.

After several test releases, VirtualBox 4.2 was officially released this morning.

QEMU, the popular open-source emulator/virtualizer commonly used in conjunction with KVM, had a fairly quick v1.2 development cycle but that doesn't mean it's weak on changes.

A third release candidate of VirtualBox 4.2 was released this week.

Less than two weeks after VirtualBox 4.2 Beta 1, Oracle's German office has released the first release candidate of VirtualBox 4.2.

Xen 4.2 will be released in the near future for this one of the leading virtualization platforms available for Linux. Xen 4.2 is packing in a number of new features.

Dell has written a guest post on Phoronix with some Linux virtualization tips.

VMware is preparing to push VMCI support into the mainline Linux kernel.

QEMU 1.1 provides experimental support for USB 3.0 devices, which provides higher transfer through-put rates while sometimes at a lower CPU usage rate.

With the ongoing work to better enable virtualization support for the ARM architecture under Linux, the developers working on Xen enablement have reached a new milestone.

For those not up to speed on the latest features for Linux virtualization when using QEMU/KVM, there is support since for USB device redirection over the network for virtual machines.

To further enhance the Linux virtualization experience with VMware products, the company is preparing to push the Virtual Machine Communication Interface and VMCI Sockets into the mainline Linux kernel.

For those wanting to setup a Xen VGA pass-through configuration whereby your host graphics card can be controlled by a guest operating system, like Windows within Linux, here's a guide how to setup this interesting feature.

The xf86-video-vmware 12.0 driver was officially released yesterday, which now means all of the components needed for 3D Linux guest acceleration are now available and stable.

After thoroughly testing the VMware graphics driver stack yesterday and providing benchmarks, there's some new "vmwgfx" developments to report on.

oVirt, the open-source virtualization infrastructure and management platform, just had its first release.

A discussion has been started about a next-generation API for Linux KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) virtualization.

VMware's overhauled Linux graphics driver stack is shaping up and coming together nicely in time for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which will allow for 2D/3D guest acceleration within virtualized guest machines.

Here's a heck of a Christmas present if you happen to be a VMware customer and use their virtualization software with Linux guests where the desktop experience is important: vmwgfx_branch has finally been merged to master! This merge touches over 16,000 lines of code in their X.Org graphics driver.

A second development release of GNOME Boxes is now available. GNOME Boxes is an in-development virtual machine management application.