kvm-81 release

This release fixes a bunch of display regressions, and restores userspace/kernel compatibility with older kernel modules. There are a few other goodies hidden in there, for example scsi is now enabled on >4G guests.

Changes from kvm-80:
- merge qemu-svn
- fix performance regression with qcow2 files
- improve qcow2 data integrity with cache=writethrough
- fix display corruption with gnome panel auto-appear
- scsi improvements
- shld/shrd instruction emulation and unit test (Guillaume Thouvenin)
- ppc updates (Hollis Blanchard, Deepa Srinivasan, Christian Ehrhardt)
- prepare virtio for upstream merging (Anthony Liguori)
- fix uninitialized variable in virtio-net (Anthony Liguori)
- fix compile failure on Debian (Amit Shah)
- fix display loss in opensuse 11 installer
- fix vmmcall emulation on intel (Amit Shah)
- fixes amd->intel migration
- allow userspace to work with modules from kvm-79 and earlier
- fix undefined behaviour copying cpuid signature (Guillaume Thouvenin)
- fix build with --kerneldir (Maik Hentsche)
- really exit if device assignment fails (Mark McLoughlin)
- fix vga on ia64 (Xiantao Zhang)
- simplify nmi injection from userspace (Jan Kiszka)
- enable virtio zero-copy (Mark McLoughlin)
- also fixes crash in rare cases
- fix display loss on 32-bit hosts
- reduce tlb flushing when resyncing pages (Marcelo Tosatti)
- don't resync global pages on context switch (Marcelo Tosatti)
- improves HIGHMEM performance
- prepopulate shadow on invlpg (Marcelo Tosatti)
- fix kvmclock when HZ != 1000 (Eduardo Habkost)
- fix module unload race oops (Christian Borntraeger)
- reduce stack footprint on large hosts (Rusty Russell)
- reduce capability reporting code duplication
- check for missing pae pdptr on invlpg emulation (Marcelo Tosatti)
- fixes solaris 10 oops
- fix handlig of ack from irq shared between assigned and emulated devices (Mark McLoughlin)
- fix nmi-vs-irq race for -no-kvm-irqchip (Jan Kiszka)

Notes:
If you use the modules bundled with kvm-81, you can use any version
of Linux from 2.6.16 upwards. You may also use kvm-81 userspace with the kvm modules provided by Linux 2.6.25 or above. Some features may only be available in newer releases.

http://kvm.qumranet.com

I have a truly marvellous patch that fixes the bug which this
signature is too narrow to contain.

hi,
until kvm-80 it compile on rhel/centos-5 with:
./configure --with-patched-kernel --kerneldir=./kernel --prefix=/usr --audio-drv-list=oss,alsa
but now gives this error:
Error: kernelversion not found
Please make sure your kernel is configured
in can make a symlink in kernel/include to /lib/modules/uname -r/build/include/config
but is it a feature of bug?

  Levente                               "Si vis pacem para bellum!"

You shouldn't use --with-patched-kernel, that's useful only if your host kernel is kvm.git, not a vendor kernel.

Use ./configure --prefix=/usr --audio-drv-list=oss,alsa

error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function

my host kernel or my host's kvm kernel module use vendor's kernel's kvm module? since we build custom kernel module for kvm and that's why we use these options until now.

  Levente                               "Si vis pacem para bellum!"

--with-patched-kernel means the host kernel comes with kvm.ko and all the associated headers. That's not true for CentOS 5.2.

If for some reason you want to build kvm's qemu and don't want the modules, simply ./configure (without --with-patched-kernel) and throw the modules away.

error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function

the best news in the last 10-20 kmv release we finally able to run all of our guests with kvm-81 (even mandrake-10:-)))

the only problem that fedora-9's older kernel can not boot, but i boot with the latest fedora-9 kernel, upgrade to fedora-10 hand in graphical mode, crash in text mode and preupgrade hang with 100% cpu) so we can use only f-9.
i hope it'll be easier to fix this fedora kernel's problem the the mandrake one.

our setup:
- host:
- Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz
- Intel S3000AHV
- 8GB RAM
- CentOS-5.2
- kernel-2.6.18-92.1.18.el5 x86_64 64bit
- guest-1:
- CentOS-5.2 - 4 vcpu
- kernel-2.6.18-92.1.18.el5 i386 32bit
- guest-2:
- CentOS-5.2 - 4 vcpu
- kernel-2.6.18-92.1.18.el5 x86_64 64bit
- guest-3:
- Mandrake-9 - 1 vcpu
- kernel-2.4.19.16mdk-1-1mdk 32bit
- guest-4:
- Mandrake-10 - 1 vcpu
- kernel-2.6.14.2-p4-smp 32bit
- guest-5:
- Windows XP Professional 32bit - 2 vcpu
- guest-7:
- Fedora-9 - 4 vcpu
- kernel-2.6.27.5-37.fc9.i686

  Levente                               "Si vis pacem para bellum!"

Solaris 10 guest does not boot on CentOS 5.2. The boot screen keeps circling.

Is this a regression? If so, which was the last version that worked?

error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function

Not sure. Solaris 10 does not work successfully with KVM-76, KVM-80 and KVM-81. Booting into failsafe mode seems to be fine.

Other guests like CentOS 3.x, 5.x and XP work fine.

$ uname -a
Linux desktop 2.6.18-92.1.18.el5 #1 SMP Wed Nov 12 09:19:49 EST 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Simon