Fedora 13 to simplify migration from Xen to KVM and more

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Fedora, the Linux operating system supported by Red Hat, will reach version 13 in May 2010, and will introduce a number of new features to enrich the KVM capabilities:

  • Hostinfo
    Allow a virtual machine to see information and statistics from the host operating system, under narrow and strictly controlled conditions and only at the discretion of the host administrator.
  • KVM Stable PCI Addresses
    Allow devices in KVM guest virtual machines to retain the same PCI address allocations as other devices are added or removed from the guest configuration.
    (this is particularily important for Windows guests in order to prevent warnings or reactivation when device addresses change)
  • Shared Network Interface
    Enable guest virtual machines to share a physical network interface (NIC) with other guests and the host operating system. This allows guests to independently appear on the same network as the host machine.
  • VHostNet
    Enable kernel acceleration for kvm networking.
  • VirtAppliances
    Extend support for virtual appliances in management tools.
  • VirtAuthorization
    Configuration of fine grained authorization for remote virtual machine management services.
  • VirtVNCResourceTunnel
    Provide client access to guest resources such as the serial console, and sound card output, by tunnelling over the VNC connection.
  • VirtioSerial
    This feature modifies the current single-port virtio-console device to guests running on top of qemu and kvm. It exposes multiple ports to the guest in the form of simple char devices for simple IO between the guest and host userspaces. It also allows for multiple such devices to be exposed, lifting the current single device restriction.
  • Xen to KVM Migration
    Provide nearly effortless automatic translation of Xen virtual machines to KVM virtual machines.
  • Xen pvops Dom0
    Dom0 support for pvops-based kernel to support hosting of Xen guests which has been lacking since Fedora 8.
    (currently Fedora releases 11 and 12 contain Xen hypervisor and tools, but Xen dom0 capable kernel is missing)

Of course many of them may be included in the next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which gives a good idea of how the KVM platform will evolve.

Thanks to linux-kvm.com for the news.