6. Virtualization

Running 16 cores or more using AMD Rev F processors no longer results in system resets when performing fully-virtualized guest installations.

On an AMD NPT system used as a PAE host, guests can now have more than 4GB of memory.

Note that nested paging can only translate 32-bit guest virtual addresses. This is because of a hardware feature that exists only in 32-bit physical address extensions (PAE).

When entering the second stage of a Windows™ Server 2003 installation, you no longer need to manually edit /etc/xen/[name of guest machine] to continue. The current user interface now allows you to change media on CD-ROMs attached to the guest.

The Virtual Machine Manager (virt-manager) included in this release now allows users to specify kernel boot parameters to the paravirtualized guest installer.

During the lifetime of dom0, you can now create guests (i.e. xm create) more than 32,750 times.

When using virt-manager to add disks to an existing guest, duplicate entries are no longer created in the guest's /etc/xen/[domain name] configuration file.

Paravirtualized guests can only have a maximum of 16 disk devices.

Repeated live migration of paravirtualized guests between two hosts may cause one host to panic. If a host is rebooted after migrating a guest out of the system and before migrating the same guest back, the panic will not occur.

If a system configured for kdump encounters a kernel panic while an IDE device is performing I/O, the system may be unable to successfully boot into the kdump environment. This occurs if the IDE device is controlled by a device driver other than libata, and is caused by a bug in the IDE/ATA driver stack.

To work around this, use the kdump command-line argument hd[X]=noprobe for storage devices and hd[X]=cdrom for optical drives, where [X] is the device identifier. Either command-line argument should be added to KDUMP_COMMANDLINE_APPEND in /etc/sysconfig/kdump.