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cloud-hypervisor/release-notes.md
Rob Bradford 96be82296f release: Release v0.7.0 
Expand release notes and bump Cargo.toml.

Signed-off-by: Rob Bradford <robert.bradford@intel.com>
2020-04-30 16:26:08 +01:00

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v0.7.0

This release has been tracked through the 0.7.0 project.

Highlights for cloud-hypervisor version 0.7.0 include:

Block, Network, Persistent Memory (PMEM), VirtioFS and Vsock hotplug

Further to our effort to support modifying a running guest we now support hotplug and unplug of the following virtio backed devices: block, network, pmem, virtio-fs and vsock. This functionality is available on the (default) PCI based tranport and is exposed through the HTTP API. The ch-remote utility provides a CLI for adding or removing these device types after the VM has booted. User can use the id parameter on the devices to choose names for devices to ease their removal.

Alternative libc Support

Cloud Hypervisor can now be compiled with the musl C library and this release contains a static binary compiled using that toolchain.

Multithreaded Multi Queued vhost-user Backends

The vhost-user backends for network and block support that are shipped by Cloud Hypervisor have been enhanced to support multiple threads and queues to improve throughput. These backends are used automatically if vhost_user=true is passed when the devices are created.

Initial RamFS Support

By passing the --initramfs command line option the user can specify a file to be loaded into the guest memory to be used as the kernel initial filesystem. This is usually used to allow the loading of drivers needed to be able to access the real root filesystem but it can also be used standalone for a very minimal image.

Alternative Memory Hotplug: virtio-mem

As well as supporting ACPI based hotplug Cloud Hypervisor now supports using the virtio-mem hotplug alternative. This can be controlled by the hotplug_method parameter on the --memory command line option. It currently requires kernel patches to be able to support it.

Seccomp Sandboxing

Cloud Hypervisor now has support for restricting the system calls that the process can use via the seccomp security API. This on by default and is controlled by the --seccomp command line option.

Updated Distribution Support

With the release of Ubuntu 20.04 we have added that to the list of supported distributions and is part of our regular testing programme.

Command Line and API Changes

This is non exhaustive list of HTTP API and command line changes

  • New id fields added for devices to allow them to be named to ease removal. If no name is specified the VMM chooses one.
  • Use --memory's shared and hugepages controls for determining backing memory instead of providing a path.
  • The --vsock parameter only takes one device as the Linux kernel only supports a single Vsock device. The REST API has removed the vector for this option and replaced it with a single optional field.
  • There is enhanced validation of the command line and API provided configurations to ensure that the provided options are compatible e.g. that shared memory is in use if any attempt is made to used a vhost-user backed device.
  • ch-remote has added add-disk, add-fs, add-net, add-pmem and add-vsock subcommands. For removal remove-device is used. The REST API has appropriate new HTTP endpoints too.
  • Specifying a size with --pmem is no longer required and instead the size will be obtained from the file. A discard_writes option has also been added to provide the equivalent of a read-only file.
  • The parameters to --block-backend have been changed to more closely align with those used by --disk.

Contributors

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to our 0.7.0 release including some new faces.

v0.6.0

This release has been tracked through the 0.6.0 project.

Highlights for cloud-hypervisor version 0.6.0 include:

Directly Assigned Devices Hotplug

We continued our efforts around supporting dynamically changing the guest resources. After adding support for CPU and memory hotplug, Cloud Hypervisor now supports hot plugging and hot unplugging directly assigned (a.k.a. VFIO) devices into an already running guest. This closes the features gap for providing a complete Kata Containers workloads support with Cloud Hypervisor.

Shared Filesystem Improvements

We enhanced our shared filesystem support through many virtio-fs improvements. By adding support for DAX, parallel processing of multiple requests, FS_IO, LSEEK and the MMIO virtio transport layer to our vhost_user_fs daemon, we improved our filesystem sharing performance, but also made it more stable and compatible with other virtio-fs implementations.

Block and Networking IO Self Offloading

When choosing to offload the paravirtualized block and networking I/O to an external process (through the vhost-user protocol), Cloud Hypervisor now automatically spawns its default vhost-user-blk and vhost-user-net backends into their own, separate processes. This provides a seamless parvirtualized I/O user experience for those who want to run their guest I/O into separate executions contexts.

Command Line Interface

More and more Cloud Hypervisor services are exposed through the Rest API and thus only accessible via relatively cumbersome HTTP calls. In order to abstract those calls into a more user friendly tool, we created a Cloud Hypervisor Command Line Interface (CLI) called ch-remote. The ch-remote binary is created with each build and available e.g. at cloud-hypervisor/target/debug/ch-remote when doing a debug build.

Please check ch-remote --help for a complete description of all available commands.

PVH Boot

In addition to the traditional Linux boot protocol, Cloud Hypervisor now supports direct kernel booting through the PVH ABI.

Contributors

With the 0.6.0 release, we are welcoming a few new contributors. Many thanks to them and to everyone that contributed to this release:

v0.5.1

This is a bugfix release branched off v0.5.0. It contains the following fixes:

  • Update DiskConfig to contain missing disk control features (#790) - Samuel Ortiz and Sergio Lopez
  • Prevent memory overcommit via virtio-fs (#763) - Sebastien Boeuf
  • Fixed error reporting for resize command - Samuel Ortiz
  • Double reboot workaround (#783) - Rob Bradford
  • Various CI and development tooling fixes - Sebastien Boeuf, Samuel Ortiz, Rob Bradford

v0.5.0

This release has been tracked through the 0.5.0 project.

Highlights for cloud-hypervisor version 0.5.0 include:

Virtual Machine Dynamic Resizing

With 0.4.0 we added support for CPU hot plug, and 0.5.0 adds CPU hot unplug and memory hot plug as well. This allows to dynamically resize Cloud Hypervisor guests which is needed for e.g. Kubernetes related use cases. The memory hot plug implementation is based on the same framework as the CPU hot plug/unplug one, i.e. hardware-reduced ACPI notifications to the guest.

Next on our VM resizing roadmap is the PCI devices hotplug feature.

Multi-Queue, Multi-Threaded Paravirtualization

We enhanced our virtio networking and block support by having both devices use multiple I/O queues handled by multiple threads. This improves our default paravirtualized networking and block devices throughput.

New Interrupt Management Framework

We improved our interrupt management implementation by introducing an Interrupt Manager framework, based on the currently on-going rust-vmm vm-device crates discussions. This move made the code significantly cleaner, and allowed us to remove several KVM related dependencies from crates like the PCI and virtio ones.

Development Tools

In order to provide a better developer experience, we worked on improving our build, development and testing tools. Somehow similar to the excellent Firecracker's devtool, we now provide a dev_cli script.

With this new tool, our users and contributors will be able to build and test Cloud Hypervisor through a containerized environment.

Kata Containers Integration

We spent some significant time and efforts debugging and fixing our integration with the Kata Containers project. Cloud Hypervisor is now a fully supported Kata Containers hypervisor, and is integrated into the project's CI.

Contributors

Many thanks to everyone that contributed to the 0.5.0 release:

v0.4.0

This release has been tracked through the 0.4.0 project.

Highlights for cloud-hypervisor version 0.4.0 include:

Dynamic virtual CPUs addition

As a way to vertically scale Cloud-Hypervisor guests, we now support dynamically adding virtual CPUs to the guests, a mechanism also known as CPU hot plug. Through hardware-reduced ACPI notifications, Cloud Hypervisor can now add CPUs to an already running guest and the high level operations for that process are documented here

During the next release cycles we are planning to extend Cloud Hypervisor hot plug framework to other resources, namely PCI devices and memory.

Programmatic firmware tables generation

As part of the CPU hot plug feature enablement, and as a requirement for hot plugging other resources like devices or RAM, we added support for programmatically generating the needed ACPI tables. Through a dedicated acpi-tables crate, we now have a flexible and clean way of generating those tables based on the VMM device model and topology.

Filesystem and block devices vhost-user backends

Our objective of running all Cloud Hypervisor paravirtualized I/O to a vhost-user based framework is getting closer as we've added Rust based implementations for vhost-user-blk and virtiofs backends. Together with the vhost-user-net backend that came with the 0.3.0 release, this will form the default Cloud Hypervisor I/O architecture.

Guest pause and resume

As an initial requiremnt for enabling live migration, we added support for pausing and resuming any VMM components. As an intermediate step towards live migration, the upcoming guest snapshotting feature will be based on the pause and resume capabilities.

Userspace IOAPIC by default

As a way to simplify our device manager implementation, but also in order to stay away from privileged rings as often as possible, any device that relies on pin based interrupts will be using the userspace IOAPIC implementation by default.

PCI BAR reprogramming

In order to allow for a more flexible device model, and also support guests that would want to move PCI devices, we added support for PCI devices BAR reprogramming.

New cloud-hypervisor organization

As we wanted to be more flexible on how we manage the Cloud Hypervisor project, we decided to move it under a dedicated GitHub organization. Together with the cloud-hypervisor project, this new organization also now hosts our kernel and firmware repositories. We may also use it to host any rust-vmm that we'd need to temporarily fork. Thanks to GitHub's seamless repository redirections, the move is completely transparent to all Cloud Hypervisor contributors, users and followers.

Contributors

Many thanks to everyone that contributed to the 0.4.0 release:

v0.3.0

This release has been tracked through the 0.3.0 project.

Highlights for cloud-hypervisor version 0.3.0 include:

Block device offloading

We continue to work on offloading paravirtualized I/O to external processes, and we added support for vhost-user-blk backends. This enables cloud-hypervisor users to plug a vhost-user based block device like SPDK) into the VMM as their paravirtualized storage backend.

Network device backend

The previous release provided support for vhost-user-net backends. Now we also provide a TAP based vhost-user-net backend, implemented in Rust. Together with the vhost-user-net device implementation, this will eventually become the Cloud Hypervisor default paravirtualized networking architecture.

Virtual sockets

In order to more efficiently and securely communicate between host and guest, we added an hybrid implementation of the VSOCK socket address family over virtio. Credits go to the Firecracker project as our implementation is a copy of theirs.

HTTP based API

In anticipation of the need to support asynchronous operations to Cloud Hypervisor guests (e.g. resources hotplug and guest migration), we added a HTTP based API to the VMM. The API will be more extensively documented during the next release cycle.

Memory mapped virtio transport

In order to support potential PCI-free use cases, we added support for the virtio MMIO transport layer. This will allow us to support simple, minimal guest configurations that do not require a PCI bus emulation.

Paravirtualized IOMMU

As we want to improve our nested guests support, we added support for exposing a paravirtualized IOMMU device through virtio. This allows for a safer nested virtio and directly assigned devices support.

To add the IOMMU support, we had to make some CLI changes for Cloud Hypervisor users to be able to specify if devices had to be handled through this virtual IOMMU or not. In particular, the --disk option now expects disk paths to be prefixed with a path= string, and supports an optional iommu=[on|off] setting.

Ubuntu 19.10

With the latest hypervisor firmware, we can now support the latest Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine) cloud images.

Large memory guests

After simplifying and changing our guest address space handling, we can now support guests with large amount of memory (more than 64GB).

v0.2.0

This release has been tracked through the 0.2.0 project.

Highlights for cloud-hypervisor version 0.2.0 include:

Network device offloading

As part of our general effort to offload paravirtualized I/O to external processes, we added support for vhost-user-net backends. This enables cloud-hypervisor users to plug a vhost-user based networking device (e.g. DPDK) into the VMM as their virtio network backend.

Minimal hardware-reduced ACPI

In order to properly implement and guest reset and shutdown, we implemented a minimal version of the hardware-reduced ACPI specification. Together with a tiny I/O port based ACPI device, this allows cloud-hypervisor guests to cleanly reboot and shutdown.

The ACPI implementation is a cloud-hypervisor build time option that is enabled by default.

Debug I/O port

Based on the Firecracker idea of using a dedicated I/O port to measure guest boot times, we added support for logging guest events through the 0x80 PC debug port. This allows, among other things, for granular guest boot time measurements. See our debug port documentation for more details.

Improved direct device assignment

We fixed a major performance issue with our initial VFIO implementation: When enabling VT-d through the KVM and VFIO APIs, our guest memory writes and reads were (in many cases) not cached. After correctly tagging the guest memory from cloud-hypervisor we're now able to reach the expected performance from directly assigned devices.

Improved shared filesystem

We added shared memory region with DAX support to our virtio-fs shared file system. This provides better shared filesystem IO performance with a smaller guest memory footprint.

Ubuntu bionic based CI

Thanks to our simple KVM firmware improvements, we are now able to boot Ubuntu bionic images. We added those to our CI pipeline.

v0.1.0

This release has been tracked through the 0.1.0 project.

Highlights for cloud-hypervisor version 0.1.0 include:

Shared filesystem

We added support for the virtio-fs shared file system, allowing for an efficient and reliable way of sharing a filesystem between the host and the cloud-hypervisor guest.

See our filesystem sharing documentation for more details on how to use virtio-fs with cloud-hypervisor.

Initial direct device assignment support

VFIO (Virtual Function I/O) is a kernel framework that exposes direct device access to userspace. cloud-hypervisor uses VFIO to directly assign host physical devices into its guest.

See our VFIO documentation for more detail on how to directly assign host devices to cloud-hypervisor guests.

Userspace IOAPIC

cloud-hypervisor supports a so-called split IRQ chip implementation by implementing support for the IOAPIC. By moving part of the IRQ chip implementation from kernel space to user space, the IRQ chip emulation does not always run in a fully privileged mode.

Virtual persistent memory

The virtio-pmem implementation emulates a virtual persistent memory device that cloud-hypervisor can e.g. boot from. Booting from a virtio-pmem device allows to bypass the guest page cache and improve the guest memory footprint.

Linux kernel bzImage

The cloud-hypervisor linux kernel loader now supports direct kernel boot from bzImage kernel images, which is usually the format that Linux distributions use to ship their kernels. For example, this allows for booting from the host distribution kernel image.

Console over virtio

cloud-hypervisor now exposes a virtio-console device to the guest. Although using this device as a guest console can potentially cut some early boot messages, it can reduce the guest boot time and provides a complete console implementation.

The virtio-console device is enabled by default for the guest console. Switching back to the legacy serial port is done by selecting --serial tty --console off from the command line.

Unit testing

We now run all unit tests from all our crates directly from our CI.

Integration tests parallelization

The CI cycle run time has been significantly reduced by refactoring our integration tests; allowing them to all be run in parallel.