QEMU Maintainer Interviews for the 2.5 release
16 Dec 2015Hot on the heels of the QEMU 2.4 release, we have QEMU version 2.5 releasing today.
QEMU creates the virtual machine which guest operating systems run on top off. QEMU also handles host-specific things, like the storage and networking on the host.
Given the wide scope of this project, there are several changes that many contributors add to each release. To repeat the success with the 2.4 release video, I asked maintainers to record segments for the 2.5 release as well. A few maintainers and contributors chipped in with videos, and a few updated the ChangeLog page, and added new feature pages. Thanks to all who pitched in!
(Link to video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFgopoa9Rso)
In the video, we have Michael Tsirkin speaking on new security features, virtio 1, vhost and vhost-user and some guest enhancements for PCI and PCI-E; Juan Quintela about live migration enhancements (like the new autoconverge implementation); Dave Gilbert about the new postcopy migration feature; Eric Blake on QMP introspection; Stefano Stabellini on Xen; Stefan Hajnoczi on enhancements in the block layer; and Alberto Garcia expanding on a few block layer enhancements.
Side note: if you notice, the new feature pages linked above are quite detailed. They're based on a template which was prepared based on feedback from quite a few people, including Docs and Quality Engineering folks from Red Hat, the Fedora Changes template, and my experience with answering questions for my features. I included as many items and questions in the template as possible so it's easier for users to get as much information on a feature from the feature page before they ask the developer for more information. In the coming days, I hope to point out the new template to more people, and perhaps make it a requirement for new features landing in QEMU.
As with the last time, I used OpenShot to create the video, and Audacity for some noise reduction on the audio track of one of the videos. Unfortunately, this time, OpenShot on Fedora 23 crashed a lot - approx. once for each action I performed. Enabling the autsave functionality helped a lot; I lost several edits before I did that :-(