The Fedora virtualization software archive (aka virt-ark)

With libvirt releasing 11 times a year and QEMU releasing three times a year, there is a quite large set of historical releases available by now. Both projects have a need to maintain compatibility across releases in varying areas. For QEMU the most important thing is that versioned machine types present the same guest ABI across releases. ie a ‘pc-2.0.0’ machine on QEMU 2.0.0, should be identical to a ‘pc-2.0.0’ machine on QEMU 2.5.0. If this rule is violated, the ability to live migrate and save/restore is doomed. For libvirt the most important thing is that a given guest configuration should be usable across many QEMU versions, even if the command line arguments required to achieve the configuration in QEMU have changed. This is key to libvirt’s promise that upgrading either libvirt or QEMU will not break either previously running guests, or future operations by the management tool. Finally management applications using libvirt may promise that they’ll operate with any version of libvirt or QEMU from a given starting version onwards. This is key to ensuring a management application can be used on a wide range of distros each with different libvirt/QEMU versions. To achieve this the application must be confident it hasn’t unexpectedly made use of a feature that doesn’t exist in a previous version of libvirt/QEMU that is intended to be supported.

The key to all this is of course automated testing. Libvirt keeps a record of capabilities associated with each QEMU version in its GIT repo along with various sample pairs of XML files and QEMU arguments. This is good for unit testing, but there’s some stuff that’s only really practical to validate well by running functional tests against each QEMU release. For live migration compatibility, it is possible to produce reports specifying the guest ABI for each machine type, on each QEMU version and compare them for differences. There are a huge number of combinations of command line args that affect ABI though, so it is useful to actually have the real binaries available for testing, even if only to dynamically generate the reports.

The COPR repository

With the background motivation out of the way, lets get to the point of this blog post. A while ago I created a Fedora copr repository that contained many libvirt builds. These were created in a bit of a hacky way making it hard to keep it up to date as new releases of libvirt come out, or as new Fedora repos need to be targeted. So in the past week, I’ve done a bit of work to put this on a more sustainable footing and also integrate QEMU builds.

As a result, there is a now a copr repo called ‘virt-ark‘ that currently targets Fedora 26 and 27, containing every QEMU version since 1.4.0 and every libvirt version since 1.2.0. That is 46 versions of libvirt dating back to Dec 2013, and 36 versions of QEMU dating back to Feb 2013. For QEMU I included all bugfix releases, which is why there are so many when there’s only 3 major releases a year compared to libvirt’s 11 major versions a year.

# rpm -qa | grep -E '(libvirt|qemu)-ark' | sort
libvirt-ark-1_2_0-1.2.0-1.x86_64
libvirt-ark-1_2_10-1.2.10-2.fc27.x86_64
libvirt-ark-1_2_11-1.2.11-2.fc27.x86_64
...snip...
libvirt-ark-3_8_0-3.8.0-2.fc27.x86_64
libvirt-ark-3_9_0-3.9.0-2.fc27.x86_64
libvirt-ark-4_0_0-4.0.0-2.fc27.x86_64
qemu-ark-1_4_0-1.4.0-3.fc27.x86_64
qemu-ark-1_4_1-1.4.1-3.fc27.x86_64
qemu-ark-1_4_2-1.4.2-3.fc27.x86_64
...snip....
qemu-ark-2_8_1-2.8.1-3.fc27.x86_64
qemu-ark-2_9_0-2.9.0-2.fc27.x86_64
qemu-ark-2_9_1-2.9.1-3.fc27.x86_64

Notice how the package name includes the version string. Each package version installs into /opt/$APP/$VERSION, eg /opt/libvirt/1.2.0 or /opt/qemu/2.4.0, so you can have them all installed at once and happily co-exist.

Using the custom versions

To launch a particular version of libvirtd

$ sudo /opt/libvirt/1.2.20/sbin/libvirtd

The libvirt builds store all their configuration in /opt/libvirt/$VERSION/etc/libvirt, and creates UNIX sockets in /opt/libvirt/$VERSION/var/run so will (mostly) not conflict with the main Fedora installed libvirt. As a result though, you need to use the corresponding virsh binary to connect to it

$ /opt/libvirt/1.2.20/bin/virsh

To test building or running another app against this version of libvirt set some environment variables

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/libvirt/1.2.20/lib/pkgconfig
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/libvirt/1.2.20/lib

For libvirtd to pick up a custom QEMU version, it must appear in $PATH before the QEMU from /usr, when libvirtd is started eg

$ su -
# export PATH=/opt/qemu/2.0.0/bin:$PATH
# /opt/libvirt/1.2.20/sbin/libvirtd

Alternatively just pass in the custom QEMU binary path in the guest XML (if the management app being tested supports that).

The build mechanics

When managing so many different versions of a software package you don’t want to be doing lots of custom work to create each one. Thus I have tried to keep everything as simple as possible. There is a Pagure hosted GIT repo containing the source for the builds. There are libvirt-ark.spec.in and qemu-ark.spec.in RPM specfile templates which are used for every version. No attempt is made to optimize the dependencies for each version, instead BuildRequires will just be the union of dependencies required across all versions. To keep build times down, for QEMU only the x86_64 architecture system emulator is enabled. In future I might enable the system emulators for other architectures that are commonly used (ppc, arm, s390), but won’t be enabling all the other ones QEMU has. The only trouble comes when newer Fedora releases include a change which breaks the build. This has happened a few times for both libvirt and QEMU. The ‘patches/‘ subdirectory thus contains a handful of patches acquired from upstream GIT repos to fix the builds. Essentially though I can run

$  make copr APP=libvirt ARCHIVE_FMT=xz DOWNLOAD_URL=https://libvirt.org/sources/ VERSION=1.3.0

Or

$  make copr APP=qemu ARCHIVE_FMT=xz DOWNLOAD_URL=https://download.qemu.org/ VERSION=2.6.0

And it will download the pristine upstream source, write a spec file including any patches found locally, create a src.rpm and upload this to the copr build service. I’ll probably automate this a little more in future to avoid having to pass so many args to make, by keeping a CSV file with all metadata for each version.