Red Hat's Andrea Arcangeli sent out an interesting patch series on Friday to micro-optimize the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to enhance the VMEXIT performance in wake of Spectre mitigations.

The ACRN hypervisor that was open-sourced by Intel last year as a small footprint virtualization hypervisor focused on real-time computing and safety-critical applications for IoT and related embedded use-cases is up to version 1.2.

Virglrenderer 0.8 was released last week as one of the components to the "Virgl" graphics stack for getting OpenGL acceleration working within KVM+QEMU guests that is in good enough shape for handling relatively recent GL/GLES Linux games and other workloads.

QEMU 4.1 is now out as one of the important pieces to the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

In continuation of the article last week how the RISC-V Linux kernel support has been maturing and various missing gaps filled in, another feature just arrived in patch form: support for KVM virtualization.

XCP-ng, the enterprise-focused hypervisor based on Xen Server that offers a web UI for management, scalability optimizations, live migration support, and other community features, is up to version 8.0.

Coming soon to a kernel near you could be the removal of 32-bit Xen PV guest support as better jiving with Xen's architectural improvements and more of the Linux/open-source community continuing to shift focus to 64-bit x86 with trying to finally sunset 32-bit x86.

With the VirtIO standard for cross-hypervisor compatibility of different virtualized components there is a virtual IOMMU device that is now backed by a working driver in the Linux 5.3 kernel.

Back in March 2019 when Intel announced Sound Open Firmware, they also announced ACRN as a small footprint hypervisor intended for real-time and safety-critical use-cases. Now with Linux 5.3 this IoT-focused hypervisor can handle Linux guests on the ACRN hypervisor.

The past several years Siemens and others have been working on Jailhouse as a Linux-based partitioning hypervisor for bare metal appliances. Their previous release was all the way back during last year's Oktoberfest and now with construction for this year's fest kicking off at the wiesn, the developers happen to be releasing their next version of Jailhouse.

The Linux 5.3 mainline kernel will be picking up support for enabling Linux guests on the ACRN hypervisor.

A Phoronix reader pointed out to us this weekend that Intel support for live migration with their graphics virtualization technology is nearing mainline support.

Sent out earlier this month is the second version of the Xen core scheduling patches that allow for CPU core and socket-level scheduling by this virtualization hypervisor.

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes were sent out on Friday of the new feature updates for the Linux 5.2 kernel that is nearing the end of its merge window.

Intel's patches for providing shared virtual address (SVA) support for IOMMU and VT-D in the Linux kernel have been revised.

For ironing out the OpenGL 4.4+ support within their VMWGFX virtual graphics driver stack and/or for starting out work on bringing up Vulkan support to guest VMs running VMware virtualization products, their longtime graphics driver team is working on emulated coherent graphics memory support.

The big QEMU 4.0 release is now available for this critical piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

The Virtual I/O Device standard has christened its VIRTIO 1.1 specification this month. This is the virtualization standard around network/storage/graphics/other-hardware in mind for cross-hypervisor compatibility.

Proxmox VE 5.4 was released today as the server virtualization environment based on Debian and allows for easily deploying LXC containers and KVM-based virtual machines from a web-based interface.

For those making use of Canonical's LXD project for Linux containers, version 3.12 is now available ahead of this month's Ubuntu 19.04 release.

The Xen Project announced this week the release of Xen 4.12 as the latest feature update for this widely-used virtualization hypervisor.

QEMU 4.0-RC1 was released today as the second test release for this forthcoming feature update to this important component of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

Maxim Levitsky of Red Hat sent out a "request for comments" patch series this week introducing NVMe VFIO media storage device support for the Linux kernel.

Paolo Bonzini submitted the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes for the Linux 5.1 kernel on Friday, much later in the cycle than normal. This isn't due to some big ticket features landing but rather "some ugly factors" in the form of tracking down some bugs and ended up dropping some premature optimizations.

In seeking to improve the out-of-the-box experience when running the Ubuntu desktop as a guest virtual machine within VMware's products, Ubuntu is planning on having the open-vm-tools-desktop package be automatically installed for providing a better initial experience.

Support is coming together within the Linux kernel and QEMU for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack to handle Extended Display Identification Data (EDID) for the virtual displays to handle some practical improvements moving forward.

For those of you making use of Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor, the Linux kernel side bits are ready to go with their feature changes for the imminent Linux 5.1 kernel cycle.

As one of the most interesting patch series sent over by an Oracle developer in quite a while at least on the virtualization front, a "request for comments" series was sent out on Wednesday that would enable the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to be able to boot Xen HVM guests.

For those using the Virgl3D driver stack for having OpenGL acceleration within KVM guest VMs with VirtIO-GPU that is then accelerated by hosts, there are performance optimizations that have just landed in the Mesa 19.1 development code.

While Canonical often takes heat for their various project "forks", their work on LXD for further innovating atop LXC for Linux containers has really paid off. Over the past few years LXD has really evolved into quite a capable system container manager beast.