B.78.2. RHBA-2011:0012 — qemu-kvm bug fix update

When running a Windows Server 2008 virtual machine with a virtio network interface controller (NIC), unplugging the NIC could cause qemu-kvm to terminate unexpectedly with a segmentation fault. With this update, the underlying source code has been modified to address this issue, and unplugging such NIC while the virtual machine is active no longer causes qemu-kvm to crash.

Previously, qemu-kvm did not allow a user to select a resolution higher than 1920x1080, which may have been rather limiting. This update increases the maximum supported resolution to 2560x1600.

Due to an error in the Russian keyboard layout, pressing the "/" and "|" keys with the "ru" layout enabled produced wrong characters. With this update, the relevant lines in the ru.orig file have been corrected, and pressing these keys now produces the expected results.

Under certain circumstances, QEMU could stop responding during the installation of an operating system in a virtual machine when the QXL display device was in use. This error no longer occurs, and kvm-qemu now works as expected.

When running a virtual machine with 4 or more gigabytes of the virtual memory, an attempt to hot plug a network interface controller (NIC) failed with the following error message:

Device '[device_name]' could not be initialized

This update resolves this issue, and hot-plugging a NIC in a virtual machine with 4 or more gigabytes of the virtual memory no longer fails.

Previously, the conversion of a disk image by using the "qemu-img convert" command may have been significantly slow. With this update, various patches have been applied to improve the performance of the above command.