qemu: Add support for the pcie-to-pci-bridge controller Pure PCIe guests such as x86_64/q35 and aarch64/virt will now add this controller when traditional PCI devices are in use.
Xen: Drop the legacy xend-based driver The xm/xend toolstack was deprecated in Xen 4.2 and removed from the Xen sources in the 4.5 development cycle. The libvirt driver based on xend is now removed from the libvirt sources.
qemu: Support hot plug and hot unplug of mediated devices Libvirt now allows mediated devices to be hot plugged and hot unplugged from a guest rather than reporting an error that this isn't supported. In fact, kernel has been supporting this since 4.10. logging: Introduce wildcard to log filters In an effort to deprecate the log_level variable in favour of the log filters, introduce a wildcard filter, e.g. '1:*'. This change is most noticeable during runtime using virt-admin, where the only way to mimic the log_level's functionality has been to specify a number of filters which can be a bit painful.
Improve handling of device mapper targets When starting a domain with a disk backed by a device mapper volume libvirt also needs to allow the storage backing the device mapper in CGroups. In the past kernel did not care, but starting from 4.16 CGroups are consulted on each access to the device mapper target.
Support building with Python 3 Python is required to build libvirt, and up until now only Python 2 could be used as an interpreter. All scripts used during build have now been made compatible with Python 3, which means both major releases of the language are fully supported. qemu: Provide ccw address support for graphics and input devices Support the virtio-gpu-ccw device as a video device and virtio-{keyboard, mouse, tablet}-ccw devices as input devices on S390.
qemu: Add logging of guest crash information on S390 On S390, when the guest crashes and QEMU exposes the guest crash information, log the relevant data to the domain log file. qemu: use arp table of host to get the IP address of guests Find IP address of a VM by arp table on hosts. If someone customizing IP address inside VM, it will be helpful. Xen: Remove hard-coded scheduler weight The libxl driver was accidentally hard-coding the per-domain scheduler weight to 1000, silently ignoring any user-provided <shares> in <cputune>. The driver now honors <shares>, and defers setting a default value to Xen. Note that the Xen default is 256, so any domains started after this improvement will have one fourth the shares of previously started domains. If all domains must have equal CPU shares, administrators must manually set the weight of previously started domains to 256, or restart them.
Added support for CAT (Cache allocation Technology) Domain vCPU threads can now have allocated some parts of host cache using the cachetune element in cputune. Allow opening secondary drivers Up until now it was possible to connect to only hypervisor drivers (e.g. qemu:///system, lxc:///, vbox:///system, and so on). The internal drivers (like network driver, node device driver, etc.) were hidden from users and users could use them only indirectly. Starting with this release new connection URIs are accepted. For instance network:///system, storage:///system and so on. virtlogd, virtlockd: Add support for admin protocol These two daemons now support admin protocol through which some admin info can be gathered or some configuration tweaked on the fly.
virsh: Enhance bash completion Implement more bash completions so that basic libvirt objects can be auto-completed (e.g. networks, interfaces, NWFilters, and so on). qemu: Use VIR_ERR_DEVICE_MISSING for various hotplug/detach messages qemu: Allow showing the dump progress for memory only dump Alter the QEMU dump-guest-memory command processing to check for and allow asynchronous completion which then allows for the virsh dump --memory-only --verbose command to display percent completion data. conf: add support for setting Chassis SMBIOS data fields libxl: add support for setting clock offset and adjustment Make port allocator global Up until now each driver had their own port allocator module. This meant that info on port usage was not shared. Starting with this release, the port allocator module is made global and therefore drivers allocate ports from global pool. Fixed some compiler warnings that appear with GCC 8
qemu: Check for unsafe migration more thoroughly If a domain disk is stored on local filesystem (e.g. ext4) but is not being migrated it is very likely that domain is not able to run on destination. Regardless of share/cache mode. qemu: Fix updating device with boot order Starting with 3.7.0 release updating any device with boot order would fail with 'boot order X is already used by another device' while in fact it was the very same device. virlog: determine the hostname on startup CVE-2018-6764 At later point it might not be possible or even safe to use getaddrinfo(). It can in turn result in a load of NSS module which can even be loaded from unsage guest filesystem and thus escape the confinment of its container. qemu: Rework vCPU statistics fetching Fetching vCPU statistics was very expensive because it lead to waking up vCPU threads in QEMU and thus it degraded performance. The code was reworked so that fetching statistics does not wake up halted vCPUs. qemu: unlink memory backing file on domain shutdown Depending on the filesystem where domain memory is stored, some files might have been left behind. This is not a problem on hugetlbfs, but it is a problem on regular filesystems like ext4. qemu: Fix shutting down domains in parallel If multiple domains were being shut down in parallel, libvirtd might have deadlocked. nodedev: Update PCI mdev capabilities dynamically PCI devices may have other nested capabilities, like SRIOV and mdev which depend on the device being plugged into the native vendor driver. However, in case such a device is directly assigned to a guest using VFIO driver, the device will naturally lose these capabilities and libvirt needs to reflect that.
tools: Provide bash completion support Both virsh and virt-admin now implement basic bash completion support. qemu: Refresh capabilities on host microcode update A microcode update can cause the CPUID bits to change; therefore, the capabilities cache should be rebuilt when such an update is detected on the host. lxc: Set hostname based on container name
CPU frequency reporting improvements The CPU frequency will now be reported by virsh nodeinfo and other tools for s390 hosts; at the same time; CPU frequency has been disabled on aarch64 hosts because there's no way to detect it reliably. libxl: Mark domain0 as persistent Xen: Add support for multiple IP addresses on interface devices qemu: Add support for hot unplugging redirdev device
qemu: Enforce vCPU hotplug granularity constraints QEMU 2.7 and newer don't allow guests to start unless the initial vCPUs count is a multiple of the vCPU hotplug granularity, so validate it and report an error if needed.
conf: Support defining distances between virtual NUMA cells A NUMA hardware architecture supports the notion of distances between NUMA cells. This can now be specified using the <distances> element within the NUMA cell configuration. Drivers which support this include Xen and QEMU. Xen: Support defining vNUMA topology Xen now supports defining a virtual NUMA topology for VMs, including specifying distances between NUMA cells. qemu: Add the ability to configure HPT resizing for pSeries guests The user can now decide whether HPT (Hash Page Table) resizing should be enabled, disabled or required instead of leaving it up to hypervisor defaults and negotiation between the guest and the host. qemu: Add vmcoreinfo feature Starting with QEMU 2.11, the guest can save kernel debug details when this feature is enabled and the kernel supports it. It is useful to process kernel dump with KASLR enabled, and also provides various kernel details to crash tools. conf: Move the auth and encryption definitions to disk source Allow parsing and formatting of the auth and encryption sub-elements to be a child of the source element. This will allow adding an auth sub-element to a backingStore or mirror elements as a means to track specific authentication and/or encryption needs.
vbox: Add VirtualBox 5.2 support vbox: Add support for configuring storage controllers The VirtualBox driver now supports the <controller> element in the domain XML for configuring storage controllers in VBOX VMs. Additionally, libvirt's domain XML schema was updated to allow optional model attribute for <controller type='ide'> which is used by the VBOX driver to set the IDE controller model to be one of 'piix4', 'piix4' (default), or 'ich6'. Finally, with this change dumpxml generates <controller> elements that correspond to current VBOX VM storage controller configuration. vbox: Add support for attaching empty removable disks The VirutalBox driver now supports adding CD-ROM and floppy disk devices that do not have the disk source specified. Previously such devices were silently ignored. vbox: Add support for attaching SAS storage controllers In VirtualBox, SCSI and SAS are distinct controller types whereas libvirt does not make such distinction. Therefore, the VBOX driver was updated to allow attaching SAS controllers via <controller type='scsi' model='lsisas1068'> element. If there are both SCSI and SAS controllers present in the VBOX VM, the domain XML can associate the disk device using the <address> element with the controller attribute, and optionally, set the port via unit attribute. qemu: Generate predictable paths for qemu memory backends In some cases management applications need to know paths passed to memory-backend-file objects upfront. Libvirt now generates predictable paths so applications can prepare the files if they need to do so. Shareable disks work properly with recent qemu Recent qemu versions added image locking to avoid potential corruption of disk images. This broke shareable disks with libvirt since the feature was turned on by default in qemu. Libvirt now enables sharing of those disks in qemu so that the image locking is not applied in that case. Additionally libvirt now checks that shareable disks have supported format (raw) to avoid metadata corruption. Improve serial console behavior on non-x86 architectures ppc64, aarch64 and s390x guests were treating the <serial> and <console> elements differently from x86, in some cases presenting misleading information to the user. The behavior is now consistent across all architectures and the information reported is always accurate.
vbox: Do not ignore failures to attach disk devices when defining The define now fails and reports an error if any of the controller or disk devices specified in the domain XML fail to attach to the VirtualBox VM. vbox: Fix dumpxml to always output disk devices The VirtualBox driver was ignoring any disk devices in dumpxml output if there was a SAS storage controller attached to the VM. vbox: Fix dumpxml to always generate valid domain XML When a VirtualBox VM has multiple disks attached, each to a different storage controller that uses 'sd' prefix for block device names e.g. one disk attached to SATA and one to SCSI controller, it no longer generates XML where both would have 'sda' device name assigned. Instead it properly assigns 'sda' and 'sdb' to those disks in the order of appearance. Securely pass iSCSI authentication data Rather than supplying the authentication data as part of the iSCSI URL for a disk or host device, utilize the encrypted secret object to securely pass the authentication data.
Add capability to allow hot (un)plug of a domain watchdog device Allow users to set device aliases Users can set aliases to domain devices and thus identify them easily. qemu: Support multiqueue for virtio-blk Multiqueue support for virtio-blk has been available in QEMU ever since 2.7.0, and now libvirt guests can enable it. Add virDomainSetLifecycleAction API Provided a new API to allow dynamic guest lifecycle control for guest reactions to poweroff, restart, or crash type events related to the domain XML on_poweroff, on_reboot, and on_crash elements. The virsh set-lifecycle-action command was created to control the actions. qemu: Allow cold(un)plugging and hot(un)plugging input devices net: Implement QoS for vhostuser
Allow a logical volume to be create using LUKS A logical volume may be created using an encryption element using "luks" format. This does require a previously created secret to store the passphrase used to encrypt the volume Adding the volume to a domain can then either provide the secret or allow the consumer in the guest to provide the passphrase in order to decrypt the volume. net: Ignore auto-generated MAC address when detaching an interface If the MAC address has not been specified by the user, libvirt will try and fill in the gaps by generating one; however, for some error paths that led to some confusing error messages, so when an auto-generated MAC address is specified the error message will not include the auto-generated MAC. net: Enable MAC address lookup for virDomainInterfaceStats apparmor: Several improvements Changes include permitting access to data about USB devices and dnsmasq instances, allowing spaces in guest names and many more. cpu: Use CPU information obtained from QEMU when possible Recent QEMU versions can expose information about which CPU models are available and usable on the host; libvirt will now make use of such information whenever possible. hyperv: Various improvements The error reported when clients can't connect to Hyper-V has been made more descriptive, and memory limits for guests are now mapped to more appropriate libvirt equivalents. qemu: Report QEMU error on failed migration Instead of reporting a generic error, ask QEMU for a more detailed and thus hopefully more helpful one. vbox: Implement autoport for RDP libvirt will now obtain the (dynamically allocated) RDP port number from VirtualBox itself, avoiding conflicts between multiple guests wanting to use RDP at the same time. qemu: Allow rotation of small logs On a host where numerous unique instances are executed per day, it's quite possible that, even though each of the single log files are fairly small, collectively the quantity and volume may add tens of thousands of log files to the /var/log/libvirt/qemu/ directory. Removing the constraints that log have to be bigger than 100 KiB before they can be rotated solves the issue.
Fix swapped interface statistics and QoS Due to internal implementation, reported statistics for some types of interfaces were swapped (RX appeared in TX and vice versa). Similarly, QoS was set in reversed way. Properly resize local LUKS encrypted volume Resizing of a local LUKS encrypted volume will now use qemu-img to resize the volume. This will require configuring a secret for the LUKS encrypted volume. qemu: Reserve PCI addresses for implicit i440fx devices Failing to do so causes the addresses to be considered usable by libvirt, which means they could be assigned to more than one device resulting in the guest failing to start. spec: Restart libvirtd only at the end of the upgrade process Use %posttrans to make sure libvirtd is not restarted before all other components, such as the library itself and storage / hypervisor drivers, have already been upgraded.
qemu: Ensure TLS clients always verify the server certificate While it's reasonable to turn off client certificate validation, as setting it up can be non-trivial, clients should always verify the server certificate to avoid MITM attacks. However, libvirt was using the same knob to control both checks, leading to CVE-2017-1000256 / LSN-2017-0002.
qemu: Added support for cold-(un)plug of watchdog devices qemu: Added support for setting IP address os usernet interfaces qemu: Added support for Veritas Hyperscale (VxHS) block devices storage: Added new events for pool-build and pool-delete
qemu: Set DAC permissions properly for spice rendernode When a rendernode path is set for SPICE GL on qemu:///system, we now correctly set DAC permissions on the device at VM startup. This is the last remaining hurdle to let SPICE GL work for qemu:///system without any external host changes. nodedev: Add switchdev offload query to NIC capabilities Allow querying the NIC interface capabilities for the availability of switchdev offloading (also known as kernel-forward-plane-offload). New CPU models for AMD and Intel AMD EPYC and Intel Skylake-Server CPU models were added together with their features Improve long waiting when saving a domain While waiting for a write to disk to be finished, e.g. during save, even simple operations like virsh list would be blocking due to domain lock. This is now resolved by unlocking the domain in places where it is not needed.
Proper units are now used in virsh manpage for dom(mem)stats Previously the documentation used multiples of 1000, but now it is fixed to use multiples of 1024. qemu: Fix error reporting when disk attachment fails There was a possibility for the actual error to be overridden or cleared during the rollback. qemu: Fix assignment of graphics ports after daemon restart This could be seen with newer kernels that have bug regarding SO_REUSEADDR. After libvirtd was restarted it could assign already used address to new guests which would make them fail to start. This is fixed by marking used ports unavailable when reconnecting to running QEMU domains. Fix message decoding which was causing a very strange bug When parsing an RPC message with file descriptors was interrupted and had to restart, the offset of the payload was calculated badly causing strange issues like not being able to find a domain that was not requested.
qemu: Add managedsave-edit commands Using managedsave-dumpxml, managedsave-define and managedsave-edit commands, now we can dump and edit the XML configuration of domain which has managedsave image. qemu: Add migrate-getmaxdowntime command Currently, the maximum tolerable downtime for a domain being migrated is write-only from libvirt, via migrate-setmaxdowntime. This implements a complementary migrate-getmaxdowntime command bhyve: Support autoport for VNC ports It's no longer necessary to explicitly specify VNC port for the bhyve guests. With the autoport feature it will be allocated automatically. Please refer to the bhyve driver documentation for examples. qemu: Added support for setting heads of virtio GPU qemu: Added support to configure reconnect timeout for chardev devices When you have a TCP or UNIX chardev device and it's connected somewhere you can configure reconnect timeout if the connection is closed.
qemu: Report a clear error when dropping a VM during startup "Failed to load config for domain 'DOMNAME'" is now reported if a VM config can't be parsed for some reason, and thus provides a clear indication for users (and devs). apparmor: Update for QEMU 2.10 compatibility Starting with QEMU 2.10, disk images and NVRAM files get automatically locked to prevent them from being corrupted; however, file locking needs to be explicitly allowed through virt-aa-helper or AppArmor will reject the requests and the guest will not be able to run. virsh: List Unix sockets in 'domdisplay' output VNC and SPICE graphics can use Unix sockets instead of TCP/IP sockets as connection endpoints, but such a configuration was not handled correctly by virsh domdisplay, causing the respective endpoints to be missing from the output. qemu: Don't check whether offline migration is safe Since offline migration only copies the guest definition to the destination host, data corruption is not a concern and the operation can always be performed safely. virt-host-validate: Fix IOMMU detection on ppc64
qemu: Better support for international domain names (with wide characters) There were some issues with multi-byte domains getting lost on daemon restart due to truncation, so the code now handles multi-byte names a bit better. qemu: Support long domain names with namespaces Domains with extremely long names would fail to start due to temporary namespace paths being created with the whole name. The path is now generated with shortened name instead. qemu: Tolerate missing emulator binary during libvirtd restart For some time libvirt required qemu capabilities being present when parsing VM configs during startup. As a side effect VM configs would fail to parse and thus vanish, if the emulator binary would be uninstalled or broken. Libvirt now tolerates when capabilities are missing during startup. qemu: Prevent pSeries guests from disappearing in some situations pSeries guest would disappear if any of the host devices they were configured to use was not available during libvirtd startup, which could easily happen for SR-IOV Virtual Functions. This scenario is now handled correctly. qemu: Honor <on_reboot/> setting The setting was accepted by the parser, but not actually implemented. Fix --verbose option for all daemons Since v3.0.0, the option had been ignored by all libvirt daemons (libvirtd, virtlogd and virtlockd); it's now working as intended once again.
hyperv: Implement virDomainSetMemory and virDomainSendKey APIs qemu: Support multiple PHBs for pSeries guests pSeries guests can now have multiple PHBs (PCI Host Bridges), which show up as separate PCI domains in the guest. To create additional PHBs, simply add PCI controllers with model pci-root to the guest configuration. qemu: Isolate hostdevs on pSeries guests To enable better error reporting and recovery, unrelated hostdevs will now be automatically isolated on pSeries guests by placing them on separate PHBs (PCI Host Bridges).
qemu: platform serial devices can now use chardev features QEMU VMs that depend on platform serial devices can now use QEMU's -chardev option, which enables access to advanced features like log file configuration. This applies to the default serial devices for arm, aarch64, and some ppc configurations. Require use of GCC 4.4 or Clang compilers We only ever test libvirt with GCC or Clang (which provides a GCC compatible compilation environment). Between them, these compilers cover every supported operating system platform, including Windows. qemu: shared disks with directsync cache should be safe for migration At present shared disks can be migrated with either readonly or cache=none. But cache=directsync should be safe for migration, because both cache=directsync and cache=none don't use the host page cache, and cache=direct write through qemu block layer cache. Handle hotplug change on VLAN configuration using OVS Libvirt was taught to handle VLAN change for running OVS interface.
qemu: Use vCPU 'node-id' property and pass it back to qemu vCPU properties gathered from query-hotpluggable-cpus need to be passed back to QEMU. As QEMU did not use the node-id property until now and libvirt forgot to pass it back properly (it was parsed but not passed around) we did not honor this. Miscellaneous stream fixes After introducing sparse stream features there were still some known bugs left. Those are fixed in this release. qemu: Miscellaneous domain NS fixes Libvirt starts qemu domains in separate Linux namespaces for a while now. However, there were still some bugs lingering. For instance libvirt did not know how to handle file based bind mounts. Various CPU driver improvements There were some minor bugs when using 'host-model' CPU.
qemu: Add support for loadparm for a boot device Add an optional boot parameter 'loadparm' for a boot device. Loadparm is an 8 byte parameter that, when present, is queried by S390 guests via sclp or diag 308. Linux guests on S390 use it to select a boot entry. Support controlling how video devices are exposed to the bhyve guests The vgaconf attribute was added to video's driver element. Possible values are: on, off, and io. It controlls the way how bhyve exposes video devices to its guests; various guest OSes might require different settings to boot properly. qemu: Add support for live updates of coalesce settings Users can now use virsh update-device to change the coalesce settings of an interfaces while the domain is running. qemu: Allow VirtIO devices to use vIOMMU It is now possible to turn on IOTBL for the vIOMMU and have VirtIO devices use it, provided they have been configured appropriately.
qemu: block copy job can be used with persistent domains Until now it was not possible to use block copy with persistent VMs. In use cases where it's not required to recover the job after VM shutdown, it's possible to specify VIR_DOMAIN_BLOCK_COPY_TRANSIENT_JOB flag to start the copy job. JSON pseudo-protocol backing store parser supports new format of qemu 2.9 QEMU 2.9 modified a few structures corresponding to the JSON format of specifying a backing store for a disk image. Libvirt now implements the new format. Capabilities now include info about host's CAT settings Various information about resource control from the host is gathered and presented in capabilities if available. apparmor: Several improvements Allow access to Ceph config, EFI firmware on both x86_64 and aarch64, device tree on ppc64 and more. qemu: Support host-model on POWER9 machines
qemu: snapshot: retrieve image metadata from user provided files Disk images of an external snapshot created with VIR_DOMAIN_SNAPSHOT_CREATE_REUSE_EXT flag specified would not be scanned for metadata after recent changes. The metadata is necessary to allow keeping relative paths between images when doing a block-commit. Parse decimal numbers in a locale-independent way Some locales, such as de_DE and pt_BR, use comma rather than dot to separate the integer part from the fractional part of a decimal number; however, several data sources such as the kernel use a locale-independent representation and need to be treated accordingly. Support compilation with newer compiler and libc versions Several fixes have been included to make compilation with Clang 4.0.0, GCC 7.1 and glibc >= 2.25.90 possible. qemu: Query name for vhost-user interfaces at runtime This makes it possible to use virsh subcommands such as domiflist and domifstat on vhost-user interfaces. qemu: Set MTU for hotplugged interfaces correctly When hotplugging a network interface, the MTU was only set on the guest side. Set it on the host side as well. qemu: Forbid updating MTU for interfaces of running guests The MTU setting can't be modified while the guest is running, so any attempt to alter it at runtime will now result in an error rather than being silently ignored. qemu: Fix specifying QXL heads with older QEMU releases Specifying the number of QXL heads was not working correctly for QEMU releases older than 1.6. qemu: Fix migration to older libvirt/QEMU versions When the guest is started, libvirt updates the CPU definition to reflect the actual CPU features to enforce ABI. We need to send original and updated CPU definition in order to support migration to older libvirt/QEMU versions. Only the updated CPU definition was sent to destination.
Improved streams to efficiently transfer sparseness New extension to virStream was implemented so that virStorageVolDownload and virStorageVolUpload can preserve file sparseness. I/O APIC type can be specified for QEMU/KVM domains The ioapic tag was added to domain features, so the type of the I/O APIC can now be specified (e.g. putting it in userspace for KVM domains). The reason for VM shutdown is reported, if known QEMU 2.10 will be able to report the reason for shutting down (whether that was caused by the guest or not), and libvirt is prepared for that and reports that information in its shutdown event as well, if it is known.
Repository now has new README.md file The new file uses markdown syntax, so it looks better on github and possibly other web pages, but it has also more useful information. The old README is now symlink to the new file. qemu: Use GICv2 by default for aarch64/virt TCG guests The emulated GICv3 has some limitations that make it unusable as a default; use GICv2 until they're sorted out. This change makes it once again possible to run aarch64/virt guests on a x86_64 host without having to tweak their configuration. Additional capabilities for the node_device module Introduce two new capabilities to the node_device module. The first is for CCW devices, most common on the S390 architecture. The second is for fibre channel-backed SCSI devices and exposes the fc_remote_port sub-capability to SCSI target devices. Node devices now report Mediated device capabilities Endpoint devices support new mdev capability and their parents now report the supported types in new mdev_types capability. Capabilities now report information about host caches If supported in the kernel, host capabilities will now list L3 caches. The code for other levels was added as well, but only L3 caches are reported currently. POWER9 CPU model was added It is now properly reported in host capabilities. libxl: NUMA sibling distances are now reported in host capabilities VMDK version 3 files are now properly detected Interrupt remapping and Extended interrupt mode for IOMMU devices These two new features can now be controlled with new <driver intremap='on/off' eim='on/off'/> tag for iommu devices. Graphics in libxl domains now have default addresses Even though there were default addresses before this change, they were not saved in the XML. It is now possible to see and control the listen addresses properly. Default USB controllers are now added for devices in libxl domains Even though they were added automatically when USB device was attached, they could've been missing in some other cases. The logic is now fixed so there are always USB controllers, even if there was none of them in the specified XML. Limits for RPC messages were increased Hitting the RPC limits we have is easier every day, so they were increased once again and some guessing logic was improved as well. It is now possible to get more stats than ever using the virConnectGetAllDomainStats() call and push through even bigger requests and replies for all APIs.
qemu: Create memory_backing_dir on startup Libvirt's policy is that directories are created on startup if they don't exist. We've missed this one. PCIe 4.0 cards now report proper link speeds It could happen that the link speed for PCIe devices was not properly reported or the nodedev-dumpxml just failed. That was due to mistake in the field width, but should now work properly. qemu: Do not report errors on shutdown For some users, in some rare cases, it could happen that there was an error message "internal error: End of file from qemu monitor" in the logs even though no problem happened. The detection of these false positives was improved and such errors should not show any more. User-specified UNIX socket paths for virtio channels should not be reset It could happen, in some cases, that libvirt would mistake a user-specified path for its own generated one and thus remove it from the XML. The detection of such addresses was improved now. Fix address reservation during RNG hot-plug When error occurred in a specific point in time during the hot-plug of an RNG device, it could happen that an address was released even though another device was already using it, making it possible to hot-plug another device with that address, effectively having duplicated addresses in the XML.
net: Add support for coalesce settings Enabling data batching through these settings can improve network performance for guests. qemu: Add support for guest CPU cache specification This features allows fine-grained control of the cache behavior of the guest CPU. qemu: Add support for the qemu-xhci USB controller
hyperv: Support Hyper-V 2012 and newer Starting with Hyper-V 2012 the API has changed causing the existing driver to be unable to send and process requests properly. This has been resolved by adding abstractions to handle the differences and ease handling such breaks if they happen in the future. libxl: Add support for nested HVM domains Xen has supported nested HVM domains since version 4.4. The libvirt libxl driver now supports nested HVM domains by specifying the host-passthrough CPU mode when defining a domain. qemu: Implement ACPI support for aarch64 guests Up until this point, ACPI support was only advertised for x86_64 guests and disabling it for aarch64 guests was not possible at all. vz: Add support for changing the number of vCPUs qemu: Automatically choose the best USB controller for guests The recently introduced qemu-xhci USB controller is the best choice for both ppc64 and aarch64 guests, so use it by default on those architectures if available. daemon: Increase default task limit for libvirtd The default number of tasks for the pids cgroup controller is 512, which libvirtd can quickly bump into when starting lots of guests. Raise the limit to a more reasonable 32768. docs: Include man pages describing key code names and values virsh: Report initialization errors Sometimes virsh might be unable to start: when that happens, report useful diagnostics instead of failing silently.
nss: Don't require a network restart for libvirt_guest Previously, the libvirt_guest NSS module would only work properly after the corresponding network had been restarted; now newly started guests will be reported correctly right away. storage: Remove unavailable transient pools after restart Solve an issue where transient storage pools would be stuck in an unmanageable state if the source disappeared and libvirtd was subsequently restarted. storage: Fix capacity value for LUKS encrypted volumes The 'capacity' value (e.g. guest logical size) for a LUKS volume is smaller than the 'physical' value of the file in the file system, so we need to account for that. qemu: Fix regression when hyperv/vendor_id feature is used Guests using the feature would not be started at all; it is now possible to start them as expected. qemu: Do not crash on USB address with no port and invalid bus crypto: Always pad data before encrypting it If this step is not performed, when the data length matches the chunk size the decryption routines will misinterpret the last byte of data as the padding length and fail to decode it correctly.
The virt-host-validate tool now supports bhyve hypervisor Introduce NVDIMM memory model NVDIMM is new type of memory introduced into QEMU 2.6. The idea is that we have a non-volatile memory module that keeps the data persistent across domain reboots and offers much faster data accesses. However, due to a bug in QEMU, this feature is not enabled for QEMUs older than 2.9.0. qemu: Introduce support for generic PCIe Root Ports For new controllers, a generic device (pcie-root-port) will be used by default instead of the Intel-specific device (ioh3420), provided the QEMU binary supports it. qemu: Add support for checking guest CPU ABI compatibility When migrating a domain to a different host, restoring a domain from a file or reverting a snapshot libvirt will make sure the guest CPU QEMU presents to the guest OS exactly matches the one provided on the source host (or before the domain's state was saved). This enhanced check may also be requested when starting a new domain to ensure the virtual CPU exactly matches the one specified in the XML. qemu: Add support to migrate using TLS Add the ability to migrate QEMU guests using TLS via a new flag VIR_MIGRATE_TLS or virsh migrate '--tls' option. Requires using at least QEMU 2.9.0 in order to work properly. qemu: add mediated devices framework support Recent kernel version introduced new mediated device framework, so provide an initial support of this framework for libvirt, mainly by introducing a new host device type in the XML. qemu: Add support for setting TSC frequency Setting TSC frequency is required to enable migration for domains with 'invtsc' CPU feature turned on. Add support for block device threshold event When using thin provisioning, management tools need to resize the disk in certain cases. To avoid having them to poll disk usage this version introduces an event which will be fired when a given offset of the storage is written by the hypervisor. Together with the API it allows registering thresholds for given storage backing volumes and this event will then notify management if the threshold is exceeded. Currently only the qemu driver supports this. bhyve: Add support for UEFI boot ROM, VNC, and USB tablet The bhyve driver now supports booting using the UEFI boot ROM, so non-FreeBSD guests that support UEFI could be booted without using an external boot loader like grub-bhyve. Video is also supported now, allowing to connect to guests via VNC and use an USB tablet as an input device. Please refer to the driver page for domain XML examples.
qemu: Detect host CPU model by asking QEMU on x86_64 Previously, libvirt detected the host CPU model using CPUID instruction, which caused libvirt to detect a lot of CPU features that are not supported by QEMU/KVM. Asking QEMU makes sure we don't start it with unsupported features. perf: Add more perf statistics Add support to get the count of cpu clock time, task clock time, page faults, context switches, cpu migrations, minor page faults, major page faults, alignment faults, emulation faults by applications running on the platform. Write hyperv crash information into vm log qemu's implementation of the hyperv panic notifier now reports information about the crash from the guest os. Starting with this version, libvirt logs the information to the vm log file for possible debugging.
QEMU: Use adaptive timeout for connecting to monitor When starting qemu, libvirt waits for qemu to create the monitor socket which libvirt connects to. Historically, there was sharp 30 second timeout after which the qemu process was killed. This approach is suboptimal as in some scenarios with huge amounts of guest RAM it can take a minute or more for kernel to allocate and zero out pages for qemu. The timeout is now flexible and computed by libvirt at domain startup. Overwrite (clear) 2 KB instead of just 512 bytes when initializing logical device Describe the logical backend requirements better for pool-create-as
storage: Add Virtuozzo storage backend storage pool Add new storage backend to support pool and volume management within the Virtuozzo Storage environment. Virtuozzo Storage is a highly available distributed software defined storage with built-in replication and disaster recovery. qemu: Add support for memory backing with file source Add support in numa topology for file source inside memory backing (hugepages are not needed) Three new elements <source/>,<access/> and <allocation/> were added to <memoryBacking/> element. Also new configuration parameter memory_backing_dir was added to qemu.conf. network: make openvswitch call timeout configurable Adding the ability to specify the timeout value in seconds for openvswitch calls in the libvirtd configuration file. bhyve: add e1000 NIC support Add support for e1000 NIC. Previously, the only available option was virtio-net. libxl: add tunneled migration support Add tunneled migration to libxl driver, which is always capable of strong encryption and doesn't require any extra network connection other than what's required for remote access of libvirtd. qemu: add rendernode argument Add a new attribute 'rendernode' to <gl> spice element. nodedev: add drm capability Add a new 'drm' capability for Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) devices, providing device type information. Add API for individual/specific vCPU hotplug The new API allows selecting specific vCPUs to be added/removed from the VM. The existing APIs allowed only adding/removing from the end which did not play well with NUMA.
virsh: pool-list: allow both --uuid and --name in one command Adjust the virsh-pool command to support the --uuid and/or --name options in order to print just the --name and/or --uuid of pools. Introduce MTU to domain <interface/> and <network> Allow setting MTU size for some types of domain interface and network. libxl: improve support for <timer> configurations Add support for multiple timers. Extend the tsc timer to support the emulate mode. Improve conversion of timer XML to/from xl.cfg. storage: modularize the storage driver Split up the storage driver backends into loadable modules so that binary distributions don't have to compromise on shipping the storage driver with all backends which may pull in too many dependencies.
nodedev: Fabric name must not be required for fc_host capability fabric_name is one of many fc_host attributes in Linux that is optional and left to the low-level driver to decide if it is implemented. For example the zfcp device driver does not provide a fabric name for an fcp host. The requirement for the existence of a fabric name has been removed by making it optional. bhyve: change address allocation schema for SATA disks Previously, the bhyve driver assigned PCI addresses to SATA disks directly rather than assigning that to a controller and using SATA addresses for disks. It was implemented this way because bhyve has no notion of an explicit SATA controller. However, as this doesn't match libvirt's understanding of disk addresses, the bhyve driver was changed to follow the common schema and have PCI addresses for SATA controllers and SATA addresses for disks. If you're having issues because of this, it's recommended to edit the domain's XML and remove <address type='pci'> from the <disk> elements with <target bus='sata'/> and let libvirt regenerate it properly. libxl: maximum memory fixes Fix reporting of domain maximum memory. Fix setting dom0 maximum memory. libxl: fix disk detach when <driver> not specified libxl: fix dom0 autoballooning with Xen 4.8 qemu: Allow empty script path to <interface/> Historically, this was always allowed. Unfortunately, due to some rework done for 1.3.2 release a bug was dragged in which suddenly stop allowing domain with such configuration to start.
Domain events for metadata content changes The domain events framework has a new event ID that can be used to get notifications when domain metadata content changes. Event notifications for the secret object The secret object now supports event notifications, covering lifcycle changes and secret value changes. 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 storage: Add overwrite flag checking for logical pool Add support for the OVERWRITE flags for the logical storage backend including checking for existing data on the target volumes when building a new logical pool on target volume(s). qemu: Add support for guest CPU configuration on s390(x)
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. scsi: Add parent wwnn/wwpn or fabric capability for createVport Improve the algorithm searching for the parent scsi_host device for vHBA/NPIV scsi_host creation. Rather than supplying the "parent" by name, it's now possible to define the parent by it's wwnn/wwpn or fabric_wwn in the node device create XML or the storage pool XML. qemu: aggregate pcie-root-ports onto multiple functions of a slot When pcie-root-ports are added to pcie-root in order to provide a place to connect PCI Express endpoint devices, libvirt now aggregates multiple root ports together onto the same slot (up to 8 per slot) in order to conserve slots. Using this method, it's possible to connect more than 200 endpoint devices to a guest that uses PCIe without requiring setup of any PCIe switches.
lxc: fix accidental killing of containers during libvirtd restart The libvirt_lxc process was previously not moved into the container scope. As a result, if systemd reloads its config after a container is started, when libvirtd is later restarted it will accidentally kill the containers. 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. storage: Fix implementation of no-overwrite for file system backend Fix file system storage backend implementation of the OVERWRITE flags to be consistent between code and documentation. Add checks to ensure that when building a new file system on a target volume that there is not something already on the disk in a format that libvirt can recognize. qemu: Create hugepage path on per domain basis Historically, all hugepage enabled domains shared the same path under hugetlbfs. This left libvirt unable to correctly set security labels on it. With this release, however, each domain is put into a separate path which is also correctly labeled. conf: Reject domains with duplicate drive addresses Reject duplicate drive addresses for disks and hostdevs at domain definition. libxl: reverse defaults on HVM net device attach Fixes network interface attach for HVM domains when no model is specified. Emulated hotplug isn't yet supported and hence we should default to the general working scenario. libxl: always enable pae for x86_64 HVM By default pae is disabled in libxl. Without an explicit <pae/> setting in the domain <features> configuration, an x86_64 HVM domain would be get an i686 environment. pae should always be enabled for x86_64 HVM domains. qemu: Fix XML dump of autogenerated websocket As a result autogenerated websocket port is regenerated on domain restore, migration and such as it should be.
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. Allow debugging of gluster volumes in qemu Users can now enable debug logging for native gluster volumes in qemu using the "gluster_debug_level" option in qemu.conf Pre-allocate memory slots for 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