A new release: libvirt-0.4.3

After two months a lot of patches had accumulated, including a lot of improvements for Xenner and Linux container support. But this release brings a massive set of code cleanup, and just looking at the patches there there is a lot of obscure case failures which should now be properly handled (or at least better handled, like out of memory situations). I'm pushing testing updates for F-8 and F-9 if you have time and use virtualisation please review them, thanks !

A new name ?

I got married to Miss Wei LI last saturday, it was kept a simple family event with just a few close friends, everything went well except for a bit of rain ! For the name I wouldn't mind being called Mr Li, but it's probably not very practical at this point (ah and good luck getting the li.com domain, and I guess hijacking li.org would not be well accepted either ;-)

A very simple picture, people interested for more should know where to look for already. Oh it also made me fight with the Panasonic HDC-SD9 'new' MPEG-4 output, to get videos to render properly on that other OS, I didn't expect to learn so much about video format so quickly. I will post recipe and scripts later.

Releases

I pushed a bunch of releases on Tuesday, trying to catch the Fedora-9 train (I nearly missed it, it led to a not so fun curl_is_failing_to_upload debug session which led to nss3 for firefox3 is not compatible with nss3 for fedora8 curl), thanks to everybody who helped catch that train !

The releases are mostly bugfixes, libvirt-0.4.2 leading the pack, but libxml2-2.6.23 has a lot of fixes too thanks to various people reporting bug and giving patches, notably the Huawei team. Libxslt-1.1.23 includes the dozen or so fixes since last summer.

Developments

Clearly libxml2 and libxslt are in maintance mode, the focus is on libvirt, maybe I will just add support for the latest Proposed Recommendation of XML-1.0 in libxml2 before the Summer.

For libvirt, clearly we need to extend the number of hypervisor supported, maybe update and clean up the OpenVZ support too. IBM is actively contributing the Linux Container driver, I just commited a second set of patches today, you can expect good support in Fedora 10 I guess. On the high end side Sun just posted the patches for the lDOM virtualization on their Niagara based machines, lot of patch reviews those days. I also want to get a complete set of bindings for Java integrated, and now that Fedora java packaging guidelines are out, this is a good opportunity to add this.

History meme

that one is interesting, here is my contribution, as you can see I'm an old fashionned old fart, main workstation at home:

paphio:~ -> history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in
a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
319 vi
257 ssh
255 cd
156 cvs
130 make
125 ls
79 svn
60 scp
48 su
43 ping
paphio:~ ->

and on my second workstation in Annemasse:

wei:~ -> history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in
a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
362 vi
263 cd
262 make
136 cvs
115 svn
105 ssh
78 ls
67 scp
40 xmllint
38 grep
wei:~ ->

Happy new Year

yeah it's either really late or a bit too early for Chinese New year, proof that I should blog more often !

backlog

I have been away for the last month and a half, first vacation in China, and then in Paris for Solution Linux expo. As a result an awful lot of mail piled up in various folders that I didn't really had time to process, I am slowly trying to go though them, so if you get replies from a mail in November that's normal, or if you didn't get a reply, it's probably a good idea to ask again !

libvirt and Co.

libvirt development is progressing fast thanks to DanB, Rich, Jim and the many people porting, testing and using it. I really hope we will soon have easy support for most platform - including Windows and OS-X - at least as a client to remotely access the virtualization servers, Rich did most of the work. The development of the CIM provider seems to be progressing nicely thanks to DanS and the IBM'ers :-). During last week Solution Linux i got asked a few times about P2V tools i.e. tools allowing to automatically save the state of a server to allow to start it as a virtualized domain, Rich just released virt-p2v 0.9.1, it is still experimental, what it needs now is a wider range of testing to find and remove limitations, give it a try and provide feedback, thanks !

For libvirt core we still have a number of pending extensions, like support for new hypervisors, adding APIs for storage management which have been worked on by DanB, we also need to finalize a good XML scheme for 'partition' based virtualization, probably update OpenVZ, and add sound and more USB support. I will post on the list soon to try to clarify the roadmap, much work ahead !

Solution Linux

SL 08 was last week, it's the Linux event of the year where I'm sure to go, it was good seeing people around the Fedora and Gnome booth, and of course Red Hat one. My presentation on virtualization went well, even if it was more than 2 hour long, the PDF is available and a lot of people seems to have fetched it already, I assume it's a positive feedback from the audience :-)

China

I was for a month in China, what a blast! It's impossible to try to describe in just a few lines, but we went from the very cold Dalian and Beijing to tropical Xishuanbanna, most of the time within the chinese family and environment, picking only a few selected tourist spot. Things like Shanghai museum, the Great Wall or the Forbidden city are definitely must-go, but to me the most amazing was to stay and live with the chinese inside the family. The cultural gap is huge, there is so much to learn, too bad mandarin is so hard to an occidental brain (and ears), very challenging, but also very fun and enjoyable !

coral bleach

ncm, I think this may be an error of interpretation, the coral turns white when it dies, I mean when the organism dies. They form a symbiosis with alguaes and those give the color, white coral appears when the animal dies, you just have the skeletton left. White coral (with a few exceptions which are naturally white) is just like the bones left from a dead animal, it may result from increased acidity of water, but also from any other deadly condition. For example when overheating, if water temp reaches around 42 degrees, the coral rejects the alguae then dies, it can be quite dramatic because suddenly very large areas whithen suddenly, it's all dead and will take maybe half a century to get back in proper shape :-(

libvirt progresses

libvirt development progresses rapidly, as the traffic on the list can testify, we now have native secure remote operations, and there is ongoing work to add OpenVZ support. I hope to increase coverage of more virtualization engine, so far it looks good, we don't seems to have serious API design problems.

gamin

I made a new release 0.1.9 last week with some bug fixes and portability improvements.

One year in review

I didn't blogged for a year precisely. No I didn't hide in a hole or something but I just didn't really feel the need. I still did a few things:

• the libvirt project is my main work item, 15 releases in the last year, now supports QEmu and KVM, many contributors and well people are using it, so that's good.
• the libxml2 and libxslt libraries have seen their development slowing down, partly because they are mature enough, partly because I have less time, and Kasimier one of the main contributor lost his job and left the project. But Bill is still around and helps a lot !
• travelling, I had the opportunity to travel for work and also for vacations, went to Singapore twice, also Malaysia, had some fantastic time in Borneo, visited Bangkok, but didn't like Manilla too much. Also spent some vacations in Costa Rica, and went to USA and Canada for work. I really enjoy going to Asia and meet people there.
• I am getting crazy about orchids, my collection is growing fast, maybe a bit too fast, but I'm rewarded by fantastic flowers, and I'm trying more and more to travel to places where I can see them growing in their natural habitat, unfortunately they are seriously endangered, and it can be fairly hard to still find them in the wild.
• I also went to badminton training again this year but competition is really getting a bit too hard, and my body disagrees at time, I think I will slow this down a bit next year.

Overall quite a bit happened but no revolution, the most scary thing is that time flies faster and faster, so no promise about increase of blogging frequency !