Friday, October 28, 2016

KVM for IBM z Systems v1.1.2 released

KVM for IBM z Systems v1.1.2 is out today! See here for the respective blog post on Mainframe Insights, and the following pages for the formal announcements: US, Canada, Asia-Pacific, Japan, Latin America and Europe.

It ships with QEMU v2.6 and libvirt v1.3.3. Here is a list of highlights from a KVM on z perspective:
  • Enhanced SCA support
    Exploit up to 248 CPUs per KVM guest
  • SIE capability
    Expose SIE availability in /proc/cpuinfo as follows:

       $ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep features
       features        : esan3 zarch stfle msa ldisp eimm dfp edat etf3eh
                         highgprs te vx sie
  • STP host toleration
    Previously, Server Time Protocol (STP) had to be turned off in the host. In case of time differences, the TOD clock is adjusted in a smooth manner, avoiding jumps.
  • Improved removable media support
    Allow to boot KVM guests seamlessly from ISO9660 media.
  • OASIS VIRTIO v1.0 support
    Support OASIS OASIS standard for virtio devices.
  • CPU hotplugging
    Allow to add CPUs dynamically to a running guest
  • STHYI support: Added the z/VM-defined Store Hypervisor Information instruction (STHYI) for KVM guests. See also here.

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