Virtualization News Archives

Back in Linux 5.4 Xen 32-bit PV guest support was deprecated while now for Linux 5.9 it's set to be removed entirely. Last year's deprecation comes with the 32-bit usage dwindling in general but PVH being preferred to PV, Meltdown mitigations not being present, and the code not seeing much activity. Now for Linux 5.9 that support is being gutted.

Sent in last week for the Linux 5.9 kernel merge window were the initial batch of changes to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) while today some additional interesting changes were sent out.

QEMU 5.1 is now available for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

There are a few changes worth mentioning out of the VirtIO updates submitted today for the Linux 5.9 kernel.

Intel's Cloud Hypervisor focused on being a Rustlang-based hypervisor focused for cloud workloads is closing in on the 1.0 milestone. With this week's release of Cloud-Hypervisor 0.9 there is one very exciting feature in particular but also a lot of other interesting changes.

QEMU 5.1-rc0 is available as the first step towards this next feature release of this important component to the Linux virtualization stack.

Cloud-Hypervisor as the Intel-backed Rust-based VMM built on top of Linux's KVM now has experimental 64-bit ARM (AArch64) support.

Recently there has been an uptick in Linux upstream support activity around Loongson CPUs, the Chinese-made MIPS64 CPUs. With Linux 5.8, the newest Loongson 3 CPU models can even begin supporting KVM-based virtualization.

Sent in last week to the Linux 5.8 mainline kernel were all the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates.

While modern AMD EPYC CPUs support Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Intel more recently has been working on MKTME for similarly offering hardware-backed total memory encryption, an Intel open-source engineer has now proposed a software-based solution for protected memory support for KVM virtualization.

The all-important Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) code for open-source virtualization had mistakenly been applying its L1TF workaround for unaffected CPUs -- namely AMD EPYC CPUs -- for the past several months until the issue was uncovered this week.

Version 6.2 of the Proxmox VE open-source virtualization environment has been released for this web-based, easy-to-use solution.

QEMU 5.0 is out today for this processor emulator that is a key piece to the Linux virtualization stack.

Amazon is working on upstreaming support into the Linux kernel for AWS Nitro Enclaves for additional isolation around highly sensitive data within the EC2 cloud.

Added back in Linux 5.4 was the VirtIO-FS file-system driver as a a FUSE-framework-based file-system implementation designed for guest to/from host file-system sharing for VirtIO para-virtualized devices. Now with QEMU 5.0 VirtIO-FS is supported on its side.

Both of IBM's s390 and POWER CPU architectures are seeing secure/protected guest virtual machine support with KVM on the in-development Linux 5.7 kernel.

Ahead of the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release later this month, the Canonical folks working on LXD for Linux containers and VMs have released LXD 4.0 LTS.

QEMU 5.0-rc1 was released on Tuesday as the latest development release in the path to QEMU 5.0.0 expected to be achieved later this month.

VirtIO-Video is a VirtIO-based video driver for a virtual V4L2 streaming device with input/output buffers for sharing of video devices with guests. VirtIO Video has existed for a while now but it looks like it could be getting close to upstreaming in the Linux kernel.

VMware's VMWGFX open-source Linux graphics driver stack for interfacing with their virtualization software to offer guest VM 3D acceleration that is in turn handled by the host's drivers will soon be offering OpenGL 4.x support.

With how ubiquitous the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is, one may have assumed that for years the software stack was already extensively optimized to insane levels, especially as it concerns the boot time for being able to quickly respond to changes in load... But it turns out there still is some low hanging fruit such as with Amazon's "ENA" network driver and a new patch allowing it to initialize 90 times quicker.

The SPICE remote display system developed by Red Hat is up to version 0.14.3 with a few prominent additions.

Added back to Linux 5.4 was VirtIO-FS for better file/folder sharing with guest VMs that makes use of the FUSE protocol but is much faster than the likes of virtio-9p.

The Bareflank Linux hypervisor that is written in modern C++ and focused on security and serving as a framework/SDK for other hypervisors, finally experienced its big 2.0 release.

Siemens continues investing in Jailhouse as a Linux-based simplicity-minded partitioning hypervisor catering to bare metal appliances. Jailhouse 0.12 is out today as their first feature update since last summer and comes with numerous hardware support improvements and new features.

Following the Xen hypervisor in mitigating against a possible Spectre Variant One and L1 Terminal Fault combination attack, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) has added its own protections with the Linux 5.6 kernel on top of all the other mitigations they've had to endure as a result of CPU vulnerabilities over the past two years.

XCP-ng, the Xen-based enterprise-focused hypervisor offering a Xen Server Linux distribution, has released a beta of its next feature release while formally becoming part of the Linux Foundation hosted Xen Project.

Red Hat engineers have been developing virtual data path acceleration (vDPA) as a standard data plane that is more flexible than VirtIO full hardware offloading. The goal is providing wire-speed Ethernet interfaces to virtual machines in an open manner.

Following yesterday's release of QEMU 4.2, the next version of this open-source processor emulator for hardware virtualization entering development is QEMU 5.0.

QEMU 4.2 is out this morning as a key piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

IBM's work from over a year ago in working towards secure virtual machines on POWER hardware is finally coming to fruition with Linux 5.5 due out early next year.

It seems like the feature would have been wired up long ago, but with the Linux 5.5 kernel guest virtual machines running on Microsoft Hyper-V should be able to successfully hibernate.

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) improvements were sent in earlier this week for the Linux 5.5 kernel and they appear to be busier than usual on the x86 (Intel / AMD) side for the open-source virtualization stack.

As we've known for a long time, VirtIO-GPU / Virgl Vulkan support to allow accelerated Vulkan within virtual machines is in the works but still has a long road ahead. A number of other VirtIO-GPU features are also in the works or at least planning stages.

Merged to the mainline Linux kernel last week was a driver providing VirtualBox guest shared folder support with the driver up to now being out-of-tree but important for sharing files between the host and guest VM(s). While the driver was part of Linux 5.4-rc7, Linus Torvalds decided to delete this driver on Tuesday.

SUSE and other companies like DigitalOcean have been working on Linux core scheduling to make virtualization safer particularly in light of security vulnerabilities like L1TF and MDS. The core scheduling work is about ensuring different VMs don't share a HT sibling but rather only the same VM / trusted applications run on siblings of a core.

The initial release candidate for the upcoming QEMU 4.2 is now available as a sizable update to this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

The mainline Linux kernel continues to see better support for Oracle VM VirtualBox with more of the guest drivers reaching the mainline kernel to provide a vastly better out-of-the-box experience.

As a late change that was merged yesterday for the Linux 5.4 kernel that will be released in the next few weeks, Xen 32-bit PV guest support has been deprecated.

Oracle today released their second public beta of the forthcoming VirtualBox 6.1 virtualization software.

The "VIRTME" project was started years ago as a set of simple tools for running a virtualized Linux kernel that uses the host distribution or basic root file-system rather than a complete Linux distribution image. There hasn't been a new release of VIRTME in years but that changed on Thursday.

The virtual GPU/display landscape particularly for having accelerated guest graphics was once non-existent and then suffering for the open-source Linux virtualization stack around QEMU, but that is no longer the case. There are options these days to rival the GPU/display offerings of VirtualBox and VMware albeit to newcomers may not be so clear.

A second batch of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes for the Linux 5.4 kernel have landed.

Red Hat's Andrea Arcangeli sent out an interesting patch series on Friday to micro-optimize the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to enhance the VMEXIT performance in wake of Spectre mitigations.

The ACRN hypervisor that was open-sourced by Intel last year as a small footprint virtualization hypervisor focused on real-time computing and safety-critical applications for IoT and related embedded use-cases is up to version 1.2.

Virglrenderer 0.8 was released last week as one of the components to the "Virgl" graphics stack for getting OpenGL acceleration working within KVM+QEMU guests that is in good enough shape for handling relatively recent GL/GLES Linux games and other workloads.

QEMU 4.1 is now out as one of the important pieces to the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

In continuation of the article last week how the RISC-V Linux kernel support has been maturing and various missing gaps filled in, another feature just arrived in patch form: support for KVM virtualization.

XCP-ng, the enterprise-focused hypervisor based on Xen Server that offers a web UI for management, scalability optimizations, live migration support, and other community features, is up to version 8.0.

Coming soon to a kernel near you could be the removal of 32-bit Xen PV guest support as better jiving with Xen's architectural improvements and more of the Linux/open-source community continuing to shift focus to 64-bit x86 with trying to finally sunset 32-bit x86.