Re: [ANNOUNCE] kvm-73 release

[Henrik Holst <henrik@witsbits.com>]

ons 2008-08-20 klockan 18:04 +0300 skrev Avi Kivity:
> The big change is of course full swapping support, finally delivering 
> the full range of Linux memory management operations to kvm.  You will 
> need a 2.6.27 host to use this functionality, however.
> 
> Other noteworthy changes: speedups of both virtio-net and qcow2 with 
> cache=off.  Two important works-in-progress: device assignment (not 
> usable yet, as dma support is still missing) and the real-mode emulation 
> framework.
> 
> Changes from kvm-72:
> - merge qemu-svn
>    - improve qcow2 performance with cache=off
>    - ide fixes
> - ia64 external module (Xiantao Zhang)
> - external module compatibility with 2.6.27 hosts
> - fix sysenter msrs save/restore (Alexander Graf)
> - fix 2.6.26 host support (Nikola Ciprich)
> - fix linux-user build (Philippe Gerum)
> - virtio-net speedup (Mark McLoughlin)
> - fix ./configure with multiple arguments
> - support Windows hibernation on non-FlexPriority hosts
> - fix makefile dependencies (Sheng Yang)
> - fix compiler warnings (Jan Kiszka)
> - work around dhclient checksum offload brokenness (Anthony Liguori)
> - full swapping support (Andrea Arcangeli)
>    - needs 2.6.27 hosts
> - internal irq ack notification api
>    (Marcelo Tosatti, Amit Shah, Ben-Ami Yassour, me)
> - fix pit timer interrupt injection logic (Marcelo Tosatti)
> - paravirt guest: query tsc frequency from host (Glauber Costa)
> - pci device assignment (Amit Shah, Ben-Ami Yassour, Weidong Han)
>    - still lacking dma
> - fix large page crash on z10 mainframes (Christian Borntraeger)
> - stack usage reduction (Dave Hansen, Sheng Yang)
> - code cleanup (Sheng Yang)
> - fix debug register corruption on Intel hosts (Marcelo Tosatti)
> - fix -no-kvm-irqchip
> - fix irq acking on pic reset (Marcelo Tosatti)
> - ignore spurious timer interrupt acks
> - limit device assignment to privileged user (Amit Shah)
> - big real mode emulation framework (Mohammed Gamal)
> - simpify irq injection (Amit Shah)
> - dummy irq ack notifier for ia64 (Xiantao Zhang)
> 
> 
> Notes:
>      If you use the modules bundled with kvm-73, you can use any version
> of Linux from 2.6.16 upwards.  You may also use kvm-73 userspace with
> the kvm modules provided by Linux 2.6.22 or above.  Some features may
> only be available in newer releases.
> 
> http://kvm.qumranet.com
> 

Scsi and virtio block devices still do not survive a guest reboot (that
is after a guest reboot the bios cannot find any bootable devices and
thus halts). Using extboot.bin from kvm-71 makes it work so there is
still something very strange going on.

I have tried to locate what it might be but cannot find why ide devices
survives the reboot while scsi and virtio does not...

On the plus side it seams like kvm-73 fixed one issue for us where a
ubuntu-8.04-i386 server guest running on a amd64 host had troubles using
a scsi device (for example a mkfs.ext3 would never finish). 

/Henrik Holst