Virtualization News Archives

Landing in the Linux 4.2 kernel was the new VirtIO GPU driver to be used with the open-source Linux virtualization stack as the first step towards having open-source GPU hardware acceleration in guest VMs. While that initial code drop didn't hook up any 3D rendering support, there's now patches for doing just that.

Xen virtualization has a few new features for Linux 4.3.

After NVIDIA announced GRID 2.0, AMD has used VMworld 2015 to launch "the world's first hardware-based GPU virtualization solution, the AMD Multiuser GPU."

VMware this morning announced Workstation 12 Pro and Workstation 12 Player with a variety of virtualization improvements for Windows and Linux.

QEMU 2.4 was released today as the newest version of this open-source component that's key to the Linux virtualization stack.

Back in May was the big "VENOM" security vulnerability affect QEMU whereby VM security could be escaped through QEMU's virtual floppy disk drive. In June was a PCNET controller buffer overflow allowing a guest to escape to have host access. Today there's a similar security vulnerability going public about its virtual CD-ROM drive.

A new release candidate came out yesterday for QEMU 2.4, the next release of this important piece to open-source Linux virtualization. With QEMU 2.4 comes several new features.

QEMU 2.4.0-rc0 was just tagged in Git. As usual, this update to an important piece to the open-source Linux virtualization stack will come with many new features when it officially ships later this summer.

After being in public test form the past few months, VirtualBox 5.0 was officially released this morning.

The third release candidate is available today for the long overdue VirtualBox 5.0.

The KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) updates for Linux 4.2 are exciting for x86 Linux users.

In the past we've written about Eltechs' ExaGear Desktop software that claims to be 4.5x faster than QEMU and allows x86 Windows/Linux programs to run on ARM. The company has sent over their latest benchmark results of their latest performance claims.

The Xen Orchestra team announced this week their next big release: Xen Orchestra 4.0. Xen Orchestra 4.0 has been in development for over nine months now and is codenamed Double Bass.

Since last year Canonical has been developing the new LXD hypervisor. As implied by the name, LXD is derived from the success of LXC.

The third beta to VirtualBox 5.0 is now available. VirtualBox 5.0 is a big step forward to Oracle's virtualization software and adds PV support to Windows/Linux guests, XHCI controller support for USB 3.0 devices, bi-directional drag-and-drop to guests, and more.

Available today is virt-manager 1.2.0 for managing KVM, Xen, and LXC virtualization using libvirt.

QEMU 2.3 was officially released today as the latest major release for this important component to the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

While full DynTicks support has been part of the mainline Linux kernel for quite a while, it's now become possible to use it with KVM guest virtual machines.

Just two weeks after VirtualBox 5.0 showed the first signs of life, VirtualBox 5.0 Beta 2 is now available.

For users of QEMU as part of their Linux virtualization that wish to test out the very latest features, the QEMU 2.3-rc2 development release is now available.

Oracle engineers have done an April Fool's Day release of the first development version of VirtualBox 5.0.

Following last week's QEMU 2.3-rc0 release, out today is 2.3-RC1 with over 100 changes in the past few days.

QEMU 2.3 is nearing its release and on Tuesday the first release candidate (2.3.0-rc0) was released in encouraging testing for this important piece of the Linux virtualization stack.

David Airlie at Red Hat continues to be working on Virgil3D for providing 3D/OpenGL acceleration to KVM/QEMU guests.

The Software Freedom Conservancy has today announced a lawsuit against VMware for failing to comply with the GPL on Linux.

Paolo Bonzini has sent in the KVM pull request for the Linux 3.20 kernel and it includes some interesting changes and features for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

It's been a long time since last hearing of any major innovations or improvements to VirtualBox, the VM software managed by Oracle since their acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Is there any hope left for a revitalized VirtualBox?

It's been a while since VMware last put down an updated xf86-video-vmware DDX driver update for use with their virtualization software. That changed, however, with today marking the release of xf86-video-vmware 13.1.0.

Xen 4.5 was released yesterday with many new features and improvements to existing functionality.

QEMU 2.2 was just released last month while already for QEMU 2.3 is a long list of changes.

The latest quarterly update to XenGT for Intel Graphics Virtualization Technology is now available that allows providing a complete vGPU solution with mediated GPU pass-through.

The latest interesting open-source project written in Google's Go programming language is called Novm. Novm is a legacy-free, type-2 hypervisor.

Parallels Inc has realized they've been wrong for the past decade of not committing to the open-source development model in full for Parallels Cloud Server with OpenVZ being neglected as a result. However, in 2015 that shall change.

The start of the virtualization related changes for the Linux 3.19 kernel merge window have been published.

Today is certainly a very exciting day for nearly all Linux users as covered in the Phoronix articles today. The latest good news is for server and virtualization users with the release of the slightly delayed QEMU 2.2.

Intel's KVMGT project is about providing full GPU virtualization for KVM.

QEMU 2.2 is due out on Friday while out now is 2.2-rc4.

Version 3.6 of XenOrchestra, an open-source web interface to the Xen Server, is now available with various additions.

QEMU 2.2-rc3 was released today but there's still a few release-critical bugs that will warrant an unscheduled release candidate and thus push back the official QEMU 2.2 version, hopefully only by a few days.

The Oracle VirtualBox team in Germany released the v4.3.20 update today.

QEMU 2.2 is near with a plan to release at the beginning of December while QEMU 2.2.0 RC1 was released yesterday.

QEMU 2.2 is under development to further advance Linux virtualization/emulation capabilities. QEMU 2.2-rc0 is now available as the first test release.

For months we have been talking about Intel XenGT as mediated graphics pass-through support so virtual machines can access Intel Haswell HD Graphics GPUs from the host under Linux and the GPU shared directly with the VMs running on the system. This work is finally closer to being realized to end-users with the code working towards being mainlined.

The first release candidate for the forthcoming Xen 4.5 is imminent ahead of the project's plans to do the stable release in December. For those not keeping up to speed with Xen development, here's a brief look at some of the changes expected for Xen 4.5.

Para-virtualized SCSI (pvSCSI) support comes to Xen virtualization with the Linux 3.18 kernel.

Back in August I wrote about new software that claims to be 4.5x faster than QEMU for running Intel x86 binaries on ARM. That software is available today.

The virt-manager 1.1 release is prepared for an imminent release that brings many features to the popular Red Hat developed software for Linux virtualization management.

Eltechs is preparing to introduce ExaGear Desktop next month as new proprietary software for running Linux x86 software on Linux ARM using their own virtual machine technology.

Xen Orchestra, the increasingly used web user-interface to the Xen Server and XAPI, is now out with its version 3.5 release while Xen Orchestra 4.0 is entering the developers' sights.

QEMU 2.1 has been officially released!