Virtualization Daily Upstream Builds

At UDS Karmic, we discussed providing daily builds of pristine upstream projects.

Specifically, I implemented this for the key virtualization packages, per https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/server-karmic-pristine-daily-virt-builds:

• qemu
• qemu-kvm
• libvirt

Ubuntu users are often running some version of the project older than the current development branch, it's more interesting to know if the user can reproduce the bug on the latest development sources.

I have constructed some automation that builds Debian/Ubuntu binaries for amd64, i386, and lpia platforms directly from your master git repositories every day at 11:00 UTC, and publishes them in a special, opt-in repository. These daily builds also drop any specific patches we may be carrying, in order to minimize the delta between the binaries built and your upstream sources.

Additionally, this tool also has the ability to expose build breakages, and it has revealed several during the last few weeks as I have been developing it.

If anyone has suggestions as to the utility of this resource, I would appreciate constructive feedback.

Cheers,
:-Dustin

QEMU in Launchpad

QEMU provides the userspace and device emulation required by KVM. As such, it's an extremely important project to Ubuntu's virtualization and cloud computing efforts.

The upstream project has not had an actively maintained bug tracker for quite some time.

I recently helped QEMU's maintainer, Anthony Liguori setup a Launchpad project for tracking QEMU's bugs. This should be a good thing for the upstream QEMU project, as well as for tracking bugs in Ubuntu's kvm and qemu packages.

See:
http://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu

I have also set up a bzr mirror of qemu's git tree, for people who are more bzr-inclined.

You can now:

bzr branch lp:qemu

Also, you can use Loggerhead to browse QEMU's source tree and revision history at:
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~qemu/qemu/git/files

Cheers,
:-Dustin

KVM's inside of Byobu

Here's a neat trick that I find phenomenally useful...

I like to run KVM virtual machines inside of Byobu, using KVM's -curses option. From QEMU's manpage:

Normally, QEMU uses SDL to display the VGA output. With this option, QEMU can display the VGA output when in text mode using a curses/ncurses interface. Nothing is displayed in graphical mode.

So this only works with non-graphical virtual machines, such as the Ubuntu Server. But hey, that's what I'm working on every day. Here's a quick demo screen cast.



Commands used in this video:

1. start byobu


2. run kvm -curses karmic-server.img to launch one virtual machine


3. hit F8 to rename this window karmic


4. hit F2 to open a new window


5. start a second virtual machine, and rename that window


6. hit F3 or F4 to move back and forth between windows


7. hit F6 to detach


8. and byobu -x to re-attach

The detach/reattach is really cool, as these virtual machines will continue running in the background. Many people use this sort of method to background an irc client such as irssi, which allows it to serve as a persistently connected proxy.

Of course, virsh and virt-manager are the preferred methods to manage virtual machines in Ubuntu, but I find this useful for my development purposes.


Cheers,
:-Dustin

KVM-84 Backport Release Candidate

Howdy,

On March 17, 2009, I blogged the following call for testing:
http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2009/03/ubuntu-server-kvm-call-for-testing.html

We have worked through a number of the issues raised after that blog post, and cherry-picked several patches that fix some known bugs. We believe that Ubuntu 9.04's kvm-84 is a far more complete hypervisor.

This is a call for one more round of testing of a release-candidate build of that package (kvm - 1:84+dfsg-0ubuntu12.1~rc*) in the ubuntu-virt ppa:
https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-virt/+archive/ppa

If you are able to assist us with the testing, please add that PPA, and install both the userspace and dkms built kernel module onto your 8.04 and/or 8.10 servers.
$ sudo apt-get install kvm

Please file any bugs against kvm in Launchpad, and please tag them with "kvm-84".
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kvm

The goal is to upload a version of kvm-84 to the hardy-backports and intrepid-backports repositories around July 6, 2009.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBackports

Cheers,
:-Dustin