Virtualization News Archives

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.

With the VirtIO standard for cross-hypervisor compatibility of different virtualized components there is a virtual IOMMU device that is now backed by a working driver in the Linux 5.3 kernel.

Back in March 2019 when Intel announced Sound Open Firmware, they also announced ACRN as a small footprint hypervisor intended for real-time and safety-critical use-cases. Now with Linux 5.3 this IoT-focused hypervisor can handle Linux guests on the ACRN hypervisor.

The past several years Siemens and others have been working on Jailhouse as a Linux-based partitioning hypervisor for bare metal appliances. Their previous release was all the way back during last year's Oktoberfest and now with construction for this year's fest kicking off at the wiesn, the developers happen to be releasing their next version of Jailhouse.

The Linux 5.3 mainline kernel will be picking up support for enabling Linux guests on the ACRN hypervisor.

A Phoronix reader pointed out to us this weekend that Intel support for live migration with their graphics virtualization technology is nearing mainline support.

Sent out earlier this month is the second version of the Xen core scheduling patches that allow for CPU core and socket-level scheduling by this virtualization hypervisor.

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes were sent out on Friday of the new feature updates for the Linux 5.2 kernel that is nearing the end of its merge window.

Intel's patches for providing shared virtual address (SVA) support for IOMMU and VT-D in the Linux kernel have been revised.

For ironing out the OpenGL 4.4+ support within their VMWGFX virtual graphics driver stack and/or for starting out work on bringing up Vulkan support to guest VMs running VMware virtualization products, their longtime graphics driver team is working on emulated coherent graphics memory support.

The big QEMU 4.0 release is now available for this critical piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

The Virtual I/O Device standard has christened its VIRTIO 1.1 specification this month. This is the virtualization standard around network/storage/graphics/other-hardware in mind for cross-hypervisor compatibility.

Proxmox VE 5.4 was released today as the server virtualization environment based on Debian and allows for easily deploying LXC containers and KVM-based virtual machines from a web-based interface.

For those making use of Canonical's LXD project for Linux containers, version 3.12 is now available ahead of this month's Ubuntu 19.04 release.

The Xen Project announced this week the release of Xen 4.12 as the latest feature update for this widely-used virtualization hypervisor.

QEMU 4.0-RC1 was released today as the second test release for this forthcoming feature update to this important component of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

Maxim Levitsky of Red Hat sent out a "request for comments" patch series this week introducing NVMe VFIO media storage device support for the Linux kernel.

Paolo Bonzini submitted the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes for the Linux 5.1 kernel on Friday, much later in the cycle than normal. This isn't due to some big ticket features landing but rather "some ugly factors" in the form of tracking down some bugs and ended up dropping some premature optimizations.

In seeking to improve the out-of-the-box experience when running the Ubuntu desktop as a guest virtual machine within VMware's products, Ubuntu is planning on having the open-vm-tools-desktop package be automatically installed for providing a better initial experience.

Support is coming together within the Linux kernel and QEMU for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack to handle Extended Display Identification Data (EDID) for the virtual displays to handle some practical improvements moving forward.

For those of you making use of Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor, the Linux kernel side bits are ready to go with their feature changes for the imminent Linux 5.1 kernel cycle.

As one of the most interesting patch series sent over by an Oracle developer in quite a while at least on the virtualization front, a "request for comments" series was sent out on Wednesday that would enable the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to be able to boot Xen HVM guests.

For those using the Virgl3D driver stack for having OpenGL acceleration within KVM guest VMs with VirtIO-GPU that is then accelerated by hosts, there are performance optimizations that have just landed in the Mesa 19.1 development code.

While Canonical often takes heat for their various project "forks", their work on LXD for further innovating atop LXC for Linux containers has really paid off. Over the past few years LXD has really evolved into quite a capable system container manager beast.

The Virtual I/O Device standard, VIRTIO, is moving closer to seeing its big 1.1 release. The VIRTIO standard as a reminder devices/drivers around networking, storage, and other areas akin to Xen paravirtualized drivers and VMware Guest Tools but designed with cross-hypervisor and cross-OS support in mind.

Paolo Bonzini submitted the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes on Sunday for the now-open Linux 4.21 kernel merge window. The x86/x86_64 KVM changes represent most of the work this cycle but there are also POWER and ARM changes too.

The QEMU emulator that is widely used by the open-source Linux virtualization stack is out with its version 3.1 feature release. This is the QEMU update that is adding multi-threaded Tiny Code Generator support, display improvements, adds the Cortex-A72 model and other ARM improvements, and various other enhancements.

Red Hat developers have proposed a new VirtIO-FS component to provide better support for shared folders/files between the host and guest virtual machines.

For helping to enhance the security of servers running KVM for virtualization, there's been a ROE protection kernel hardening patch series in the works. This new addition to the kernel allows the host operating system to restrict a guest's access strictly to its own memory. It's unclear though yet if the ROE protection will make the cut in time for the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel cycle.

QEMU 3.1.0 will be out within the next week or two depending upon any last minute blocker bugs.

Red Hat's oVirt virtualization management platform, which is used by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and an alternative to VMware vSphere, is working on their next feature release as version 4.3.

While VirtualBox 6.0 is in beta, VirtualBox 5.2.22 was released today as the latest stable release for this Oracle virtualization software.

The initial release candidate of the upcoming QEMU 3.1 is now available for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

Better/easier debugging for Intel VT-d IOMMU is on the way to help iron out any lingering issues with virtualization for directed I/O.

As part of QEMU's emulated display support they have long had a lot of old VGA/SVGA support code around. But as that code is overly complex, has been prone to security issues, and less used these days with modern interfaces, the developers behind this important piece of the open-source virtualization stack have been working on eliminating the legacy display support.

The initial round of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates has been sent in for the in-development Linux 4.20/5.0 kernel.

Intel developers today announced the release of KVMGT 2018-Q3 (also known as Intel GVT-g for KVM) as well as the accompany Xen hypervisor tailored XenGT 2018-Q3 update.

Intel VT-d revision 3.0 adds a "Scalable Mode" translation mode for enabling Scalable I/O virtualization and the patches have been in the works for supporting this within the Linux kernel.

The developers at Siemens AG working on the Jailhouse Linux hypervisor found it wise to issue their version 0.10 release prior to heading out to Oktoberfest.

In preparation for the upcoming VMware Fusion 11 and VMware Workstation 15 releases, their Mesa/Gallium3D-based driver stack for Linux guest GPU acceleration has been seeing a variety of updates.

The "vboxvideo" DRM/KMS driver for use by VirtualBox guest virtual machines that has been part of the mainline Linux kernel the past several cycles will soon see atomic mode-setting support.

VMware has landed more than fifty Mesa patches today adding a lot of new functionality to its "SVGA" Gallium3D driver that is used for providing OpenGL/GPU acceleration to guest virtual machines with its virtualization products.

Earlier this year MIPS rolled out the I7200 processor core built on the new "nanoMIPS" architecture. The open-source enablement of this new CPU ISA continues to settle down while the latest accomplishment is support for this new architecture in QEMU.

IBM developers on Friday posted their initial Linux kernel patches for enabling Secure Virtual Machine (SVM) support with POWER hardware.

There is a lot of new feature work for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) within the Linux 4.19 kernel.

QEMU 3.0 is now officially available. This big version bump isn't due to some compatibility-breaking changes, but rather to simplify their versioning and begin doing major version bumps on an annual basis. As an added bonus, QEMU 3.0 comes at a time of the project marking its 15th year in existence.

For those making use of Virt-Viewer, this utility for displaying the graphical console of a virtual machine via SPICE/VNC, its version 7.0 release is now available.

The march to QEMU 3.0 is now underway following discussions at the end of last year for jumping to the v3.0 milestone after the long-running v2.x series. The first release candidate is now available and marks a hard feature freeze for the QEMU 3.0 milestone.

It's one month late but the Xen Project Hypervisor 4.11 release is available today with great scads of new features.

Intel developers working on the GVT-g graphics virtualization technology have published their latest batch of Linux kernel driver changes.