Fedora 11 introduces the ability to use the SASL protocol for authenticating VNC connection to KVM and QEMU virtual machines. SASL is a pluggable system, allowing many different authentication mechanisms to be configured without changing the application code. The use of SASL, in combination with existing TLS encryption support, will allow clients like vinagre, virt-viewer and virt-manager to securely connect to remote virtual machine consoles hosted on Fedora servers. In environments where Kerberos is deployed, this further allows for secure single sign on to the VNC server. This new authentication capability obsoletes the traditional VNC password scheme which is not sufficiently secure.

For further details refer to the Virtualization VNC Authentication wiki page

Previous Fedora virtual guest consoles were limited to a screen resolution of 800x600, and the PS2 mouse pointer operated in relative coordinate mode. This prevented the guest pointer from tracking the local client pointer one for one.

Fedora 11 provides more accurate mouse pointer positioning and higher screen resolutions for virtual machine consoles. Fedora 11 guests default to a screen resolution of at least 1024x768, and are provided with a USB tablet in absolute coordinate mode. This results in a mouse pointer which tracks the local client pointer one for one.

For further details refer to the Improved Graphical Console for Virtual Guests wiki page

Fedora 11 expands its virtualization capabilities to include KVM PCI device assignment support. KVM users can now give virtual machines exclusive access to physical PCI devices using Fedora's virtualization tools, including the Virtual Machine Manager application.

For further details refer to the KVM PCI Device Assignment wiki page.

QEMU provides a processor and system emulator which enables users to launch guest virtual machines of the same architecture as the host machine or of a dramatically different architecture. KVM provides kernel level support for running guests of the same architecture as the host.

QEMU takes advantage of KVM to run guests directly on the hardware without any translation needed by the host, allowing much higher levels of performance.

Fedora 11 includes a merge of the qemu and kvm RPMs. The kvm package is now obsoleted by pngqemu-kvm. The merging of the two code bases continues upstream, but the Fedora package maintainers have chosen to merge the packages now in order reduce the maintenance burden and provide better support.

For further details refer to the KVM and QEMU merge wiki page

Fedora 11 integrates SELinux's Mandatory Access Control with Virtualization. Virtual machines can now be much more effectively isolated from the host and one another, giving the increased assurance that security flaws cannot be exploited by malicious guests.

For further details refer to the SVirt Mandatory Access Control wiki page.

libguestfs is a new library for accessing and modifying guest disk images. Using Linux kernel and QEMU code, libguestfs can access any type of guest filesystem that Linux and QEMU can.

The following tools are provided by libguestfs:

For further details refer to:

Fedora also includes the following virtualization improvements:

The kernel package in Fedora 11 supports booting as a guest domU, but will not function as a dom0 until such support is provided upstream. Work is ongoing and hopes are high that support will be included in kernel 2.6.30 and Fedora 12.

The most recent Fedora release with dom0 support is Fedora 8.

Booting a Xen domU guest within a Fedora 11 host requires the KVM based xenner. Xenner runs the guest kernel and a small Xen emulator together as a KVM guest.

For more information refer to: