New localPtr attribute for "ip" element in network XML

qemu: Support QEMU group I/O throttling

Add the capability to allow group I/O throttling via a new domain <disk> <iotune> subelement "group_name" to allow sharing I/O throttling quota between multiple drives

nss: Introduce libvirt-guest

New libvirt-guest nss module that translates libvirt guest names into IP addresses

daemon: Add support for runtime logging settings adjustment

Logging-related settings like log outputs and filters can now be adjusted during runtime using the admin interface without the necessity of the daemon's restart

storage: Add virStorageVolInfoFlags API

Add the API to support using the VIR_STORAGE_VOL_GET_PHYSICAL flag in order to return the host physical size in bytes of the image container in the allocation field of the _virStorageVolInfo structure. The --physical flag has been added to the virsh vol-info command to access the data

libxl: Implement virDomainGetMaxVcpus API

perf: Add more perf statistics

Add support to get the count of branch instructions executed, branch misses, bus cycles, stalled frontend cpu cycles, stalled backend cpu cycles, and ref cpu cycles by applications running on the platform

conf: Display <physical> for volume xml

Add a display of the <physical> size of a disk volume in the output of the volume XML

qemu: Use virtio-pci by default for aarch64 mach-virt guests

virtio-pci provides several advantages over virtio-mmio, such as the ability to hotplug devices and improved performance. While opting in to virtio-pci has been possible for a while, newly-defined guests will now use it automatically

vbox: remove support for VirtualBox 3.x and older

Those old VirtualBox versions have been unsupported by upstream for a long time and the API of 4.0 and newer has diverged enough to require code abstractions to handle differences. Removing support for those old versions drops lots of code from the driver and simplifies the logic to ease implementation of new features going forward.

virsh: pool-info: introduce option --bytes

Add option --bytes to virsh pool-info in order ti allow display of units in bytes rather than default of human readable output.

qemu: Correct GetBlockInfo values

For an active domain, correct the physical value provided for a raw sparse file backed storage and the allocation value provided for a qcow2 file backed storage that hasn't yet been opened on the domain

qemu: Make virtio console usable on ppc64 guests

The chardev detection code has been improved and can now handle this configuration properly

qemu: Enable mount namespace

To avoid funny races with udev relabelling devices under our hands and to enhance security, libvirt now spawns each qemu process with its own /dev.

shmem: Add support for additional models

The shmem device can now utilize QEMU's ivshmem-plain and ivshmem-doorbell, more modern versions of ivshmem

vbox: Add VirtualBox 5.1 support

libssh: New transport

The new libssh transport allows one to connect to a running libvirtd via SSH, using the libssh library; for example: qemu+libssh://server/system

vhost-scsi: Add support scsi_host hostdev passthrough

Add the capability to pass through a scsi_host HBA and the associated LUNs to the guest

qemu: Users can now enable debug logging for native gluster volumes in qemu using the "gluster_debug_level" option in qemu.conf

memory hotplug: Slot numbers for memory devices are now automatically allocated and thus persistent. In addition slot numbers can be specified without providing a base address, which simplifies user configuration

qemu: Express devices will be placed on PCIe bus by default

For machine types that use a PCI Express root bus (e.g. x86_64/Q35 and aarch64/virt), any unaddressed PCI device that is an Express device (all virtio-1.0 devices, e1000e, nec-xhci, vfio assigned devices) will be placed on an Express controller (i.e. a pcie-root-port) instead of a legacy PCI controller (i.e. pci-bridge) with the root ports added as needed

docs: Better documentation for migration APIs and flags

vbox: Address thread safety issues

virsh: Add support for passing an alternative persistent XML to migrate command

vhostuser: Allow hotplug of multiqueue devices

NEWS: Switch to an improved format

List user-visible changes instead of single commits for a better high-level overview of differences between libvirt releases

website: Modernize layout and branding

The libvirt website looked very cluttered and outdated; it has now been completely overhauled, resulting in a design that's better organized and more pleasant to look at

vz: Fix migration in P2P mode

Forbid newline character in names of some libvirt objects

Fix compilation on macOS