This week the Linux distribution Fedora reaches version 13. As reported in January, it brings a number of additional capabilities for KVM, including:
- Kernel Acceleration for KVM Networking
Network latency has been reduced by a factor of five and bandwidth availability has been improved from 90% native to 95% native on some systems thanks to a new kernel driver. - KVM Stable PCI Addresses
KVM guests in Fedora now have stable PCI addresses, reducing the chance that Windows guests will require reactivation as guest configuration is modified.
KVM guest virtual machine devices retain their PCI address allocations as other devices are added or removed from the guest configuration.
- Virt x2apic
x2apic improves guest performance by reducing the overhead of APIC access, which is used to program timers and for issuing inter-processor interrupts. - Virtio-Serial
The virtio-console pci device is now equipped to handle multiple console ports as well as generic ports for guests running on top of qemu and KVM. This facilitates simple communication between guest and host. - Support for Xen Kernel
The kernel package in Fedora 13 supports booting as a guest domU, but will not function as a dom0 until such support is provided upstream.
The most recent Fedora release with dom0 support is Fedora 8.
Booting a Xen domU guest within a Fedora 13 host requires the KVM-based xenner. xenner runs the guest kernel and a small Xen emulator together as a KVM guest.