14 DAY TRIAL // Libvirt 1.2.6, a collection of software tools that provide a convenient way to manage virtual machines and other virtualization functionality, such as storage and network interface management, is now available for download and testing.
Libvirt is used in a number of different visualization technologies, such as KVM, Xen, VMWare ESX, VirtualBox, and QEMU.
This latest iteration is also a large release, just like the previous one. The developers are constantly finding things to fix and improve, with the help of a very dedicated community.
“Libvirt is collection of software that provides a convenient way to manage virtual machines and other virtualization functionality, such as storage and network interface management. These software pieces include an API library, a daemon (libvirtd), and a command line utility (virsh).”
“An primary goal of libvirt is to provide a single way to manage multiple different virtualization providers/hypervisors. For example, the command ‘virsh list –all’ can be used to list the existing virtual machines for any supported hypervisor (KVM, Xen, VMWare ESX, etc.) No need to learn the hypervisor specific tools,” reads the official announcement.
According to the changelog, migration support and fixes have been implemented, various improvements and changes for NUMA have been added, QEMU is now correctly spelled, an example script on how to convert LXC container config is now available, a shadowed variable with the older GCC has been fixed, pkg-config files have been added to allow deps to build against source tree, the “format” parameter is now accepted when copying to a non-existing img, the header reader function is now working correctly, and the volume feature formatter for gluster pools has been added.
Also, PCI Express devices are now seen as root in udev nodedev driver, a potential crash caused by use-after-free, the closedir usage in virNumaGetPages has been fixed, broken code in freepages has been repaired, vbox snapshot xmls have been fixed, a crash that occurred when saving a domain with type none dac label has been fixed, and a memory leak that occurred with encrypted images has been corrected.
You can check the official changelog for a complete list of updates, bug fixes, and new features. You can download Libvirt 1.2.6 right now from the official website. Keep in mind that this is provided as a source package.
Some distributions might get the packages in the official repositories sooner than others, like Arch Linux, but the users of other OSes, like Ubuntu for example, might have to wait a little more.