v34.0

[rbradford]

This release has been tracked in our roadmap project as iteration v34.0. The following user visible changes have been made:

Paravirtualised Panic Device Support

A new device has been added that can communicate when the guest kernel has panicked and share those details with the VMM. This is controlled with a new --pvpanic command line option and JSON API change equivalent. (#5526)

Improvements to VM Core Dump

Requesting to dump the guest memory as core dump will now transparently pause the VM if required; returning to the original state after. (#5604)

QCOW2 Support for Backing Files

The support for QCOW2 files has been enhanced to include support for using backing files. (#5573)

Minimum Host Kernel Bump

The minimum supported host kernel is now 5.13 in order to incorporate a bug fix for KVM_FEATURE_ASYNC_PF_INT functionality. (#5626)

Notable Bug Fixes

• The x86 emulator is only compiled in if MSHV is compiled in (the kernel carries out this job with KVM) (hypervisor: x86: Emulator is only needed on mshv, not kvm #5561).
• A regression has been fixed in VFIO support for devices that use MSI rather than MSI-X (pci: vfio: Don't assume MSI-X is enabled #5658).
• When triggering a VM shutdown or reset via I/O the vCPU thread will be blocked until that asynchronous event has been received (vmm: Only return from reset driven I/O once event received #5645).
• Pausing a VM is now a synchronous action with the request only completing when all vCPUs are paused (vmm: Ensure vcpu pause is synchronised #5611).
• Event monitor support now correctly supports concurrent access (event_monitor: refactor the implementation to support concurrent access #5633).
• Bug fixes for the QCOW2 file support (Support qcow backing file #5573).

Contributors

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to our release:

• Alyssa Ross hi@alyssa.is
• Anatol Belski anbelski@linux.microsoft.com
• Bo Chen chen.bo@intel.com
• Changyuan Lyu changyuanl@google.com
• Christian Blichmann cblichmann@google.com
• Manish Goregaokar manishsmail@gmail.com
• Omer Faruk Bayram omer.faruk@sartura.hr
• Philipp Schuster philipp.schuster@cyberus-technology.de
• Praveen K Paladugu prapal@linux.microsoft.com
• Rob Bradford rbradford@rivosinc.com
• Ruslan Mstoi ruslan.mstoi@intel.com
• Yi Wang foxywang@tencent.com
• Yong He alexyonghe@tencent.com
• Yu Li liyu.yukiteru@bytedance.com
• dom.song dom.song@amperecomputing.com

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This discussion was created from the release v34.0.