Here is the August 2010 Project Golden Ratio data… GR_StatsAugust2010 Quick highlights for those of you not interested in all the details: 20,874 views of the Xen.org Blog 80.08% Answer rate on xen-users 171 new users on the three main mailing lists (xen-users/xen-devel/xen-api) 3,951 hits on the Xen.org Solution Search Tool with 590 click thrus [...]

Today proxmox version 1.6 was released featuring tools from upstream qemu 0.12.5 and OpenVZ support. There was in fact one feature removal of KSM ( kernel samepage merging ) due to lack of support for this feature in openvz. This release is based on linux kernel 2.6.32 and the corresponding DRBD version 8.3.7.

Below shows the official changelog

In the September 2010 LinuxPro Magazine there is a nice article on Remus and Xen 4. I recommend picking up a copy of this issue to learn more about Xen 4 and Remus.

Today saw the release of SPICE version 0.6.0. According to the announcement, this version comes with new features like offscreen surfaces and WAN mode. Packages are still being put together for Fedora 14 but you can download the sources and binaries at www.spice-space.org/download.html .

The official changelog for this release is as follows:

Change is inevitable – except from a vending machine Robert Gallagher It is with great reluctance that I announce my departure from Xen.org as your community manager. Working with the many community members from around the world over the past three years has been a highlight in my career and I have learned so much [...]

Xen Directions South America in Sao Paulo is underway with plenty of great speakers from Cloud Providers, Google, Citrix, and Ian Pratt giving his standard opening thoughts on the future of Xen.org and associated technologies. Many people are taking pictures so I will be sure to post links to these once I get the information [...]

Welcome to the Xen.org weekly newsletter with a variety of information to keep you updated on all things Xen. Please feel free to contact me with suggestions for the newsletter. Xen News Xen User Group LA Video – http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2010/08/26/xen-user-group-la-event-video/ Xen Summit Asia – Call for Speakers – http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2010/08/24/xen-summit-asia-call-for-speakers/ Project ThreeEyes Proposal for Review – http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2010/08/24/project-threeeyes-proposal-received/ [...]

The latest build of the kvm virtio drivers are now available at fedoraproject.org. The drivers include virtio drivers for ballooning memory, virtioserial, network and viostor ( block drivers ). These drivers are signed but not WHQL and there are no gui installers for them. If you’ve been running virtio network drivers already, you can upgrade to this latest build by using the procedure outlined in an earlier post: upgrading virtio network drivers .

The Inaugural Xen User Group Los Angeles from The Bitsource on Vimeo.

From Andre Przywara: while experimenting with guest NUMA configurations I realized that Xen injects the host’s core number into each guest. I believe this behavior is wrong, the number of cores should somehow be dependent from the number of VCPUs. Currently a CPUID decoding tool of mine gives me the following output for a 4 [...]

RELEASE-4.0.1 has been tagged in http://xenbits.xen.org/xen-4.0-testing.hg Browsing the above URL will show the mercurial changelog contains many many bug fixes since 4.0.0. We recommend all users to upgrade. A source tarball will soon be available from http://www.xen.org/products/xen_source.html

The Xen.org community is actively looking for speakers at the Nov 3-4 Xen Summit Asia at Samsung in Seoul, Korea. Please submit topic abstracts at http://xensummit.org

As I mentioned a few weeks back, Project ThreeEyes is the new effort to completely revamp the existing Xen.org website. I have opened the process up for web development companies to bid on and have received the first bid from Accelerator Enterprise Technologies. Here are the main highlights of their proposal: *********** We firmly believe [...]

As part of the new Why Xen? document series, I am announcing the Why Xen? brochure for community use: here. Also available are the following: White Paper -  http://www.xen.org/files/Marketing/WhyXen.pdf Slides – http://www.slideshare.net/xen_com_mgr/why-xen-slides As is standard, if you have any feedback or changes please let me know. I am also looking to get translated copies of [...]

From Ian Campbell: As previously discussed we would like to relicense libxc under the LGPL. http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2010/07/26/xen-org-source-code-license-change-request/ http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2010-07/msg01378.html We have now managed to track down all but one of the necessary contributors in order to make this change and all have given their OK to the change. Due to the missing contributor (who we do not [...]

From Oracle comes an excellent site with good information on virtualization, Xen, and Oracle VM.  The site is http://itnewscast.com/underground-oracle-vm-manual.

The latest release of the kvm kernel module based on linux kernel 2.6.35 is now available. This release comes with just a few bug fixes. The kernel module allow you to use the latest kvm features with older kernels as long as your kernel supports the included features. To use the kernel module, simply uncompress the tar ball and run configure, make and make install. The official announcement list the following changes outlined below.

KVM changes since kvm-kmod-2.6.35-rc3:

VMware Professional Services organization recently announced partnerships with Lakeside Software and Liquidware Labs. Tools from these vendors will supposedly be used for VDI capacity planning. If this is really the case, then what is the role of VMware Capacity Planner in desktop virtualization planning? Is VMware conceding that VMware Capacity Planner is suitable for server virtualization planning only?

Only 2 more weeks until Xen Directions South America at LinuxCon Brazil in Sao Paulo. Speakers include: * Ian Pratt * Marco Sinhoreli * George Dunlap * Liberie Cunha-Neto * Rogerio Ferreira * Antonio Pina * Gunther Boeckmann * Thiago Cordeiro * Emanuel dos Reis Rodrigues * Fabio King * Heitor Medrado de Faria * [...]

All the presentation slides for talks given at the recent KVM Forum 2010 conference held last week in Boston are now available at the official KVM wiki website. All the talks were video taped and videos will also be made available very soon. This years forum was held over two days, August 9th and 10th and was colocated with the linuxcon conference. The keynote speakers for the KVM forum were Avi Kivity of Red Hat, who is the creator of the KVM project and Anthony Liguouri of IBM, the maintainer of the closely related qemu project.

Xen Summit Asia 2010 in Seoul, Korea (Nov 2-3) is now accepting applications for topics/speakers at http://xensummit.org. This online tool allows speakers to enter topics/abstracts and submit papers if they so choose for review by the Program Committee. Please enter your ideas at this site so we can start to put together the agenda earlier [...]

Jeremy  Fitzhardinge has recently pulled in a bunch of Oracle patches that make Linux now work quite well with Xorg/KMS/3D. So with the latest xen/stable-2.6.32.x you can now play OpenArena (Quake clone) under your Dom0 (and you could do theoretically that under DomU, but it hasn’t been tried). Under the PV-OPS kernel and with Xorg [...]

I am pleased to introduce the Program Committee for Xen Summit Asia at Samsung: Patrick Colp Ian Pratt Sang-bum Suh Pradeep Padala Chuck Yoo Todd Desham Jun Nakajima Eddie Dong Dan Magenheimer Hitoshi Matsumoto I look forward to a great event this November in Seoul, Korea. I will be posting info on submitting topics later [...]

[PATCH] Remus breaks the build – http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2010-08/msg00696.html Jeremy Fitzhardinge submitted a patch to fix a compile issue caused by Remus… “Remus tries to go out of the tools directory and build in the kernel directory. This assumes that we’re actually building a kernel out of the xen build tree, and that kernel is actually being [...]

Welcome to the Xen.org weekly newsletter with a variety of information to keep you updated on all things Xen. Please feel free to contact me with suggestions for the newsletter. Xen News Community Member Spotlight Dulloor Rao – http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2010/08/09/community-member-spotlight-dulloor-rao/ Virtualization and over-subscription: breaking the 100% utilization barrier- http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2010/08/11/virtualization-and-over-subscription-breaking-the-100-utilization-barrier/ Why Xen?

From Ian Campbell – http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2010-08/msg00728.html The last in-tree user of the xc_ptrace functionality was removed in changeset:   21732:eb34666befcc user:        Ian Jackson <Ian.Jackson@eu.citrix.com> date:        Fri Jul 02 17:46:01 2010 +0100 files:       [...] description: tools/debugger/gdb: Remove gdb This code is not maintained, does not work properly, and no-one is using it.  Delete it, following discussion on xen-devel. [...]