[SOLVED] Why RHEL7.4 keeps outdated qemu packages?

czezz · 06-20-2018, 05:28 AM

My KVM host is based on RHEL 7.4 and here are some more details:

Code:

# cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 7.4 (Maipo)

# uname -a
Linux master1 3.10.0-693.17.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jan 14 10:36:03 EST 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

# rpm -qa | grep -i qemu
ipxe-roms-qemu-20170123-1.git4e85b27.el7_4.1.noarch
qemu-kvm-common-1.5.3-141.el7_4.5.x86_64
qemu-kvm-1.5.3-141.el7_4.5.x86_64
qemu-img-1.5.3-141.el7_4.5.x86_64
libvirt-daemon-driver-qemu-3.2.0-14.el7_4.7.x86_64

Problem:
when I want to create a snapshot of VM (hosted on this machine) I get following error:

Code:

live disk snapshot not supported with this qemu binary

What I have read/goodle'd, qemu supports "live disk snapshot" starting from version 2.0/2.1

Questions:
1. Why RHEL 7.4 keeps outdated qemu-kvm-1.5.3 which does not allow to do live disk snapshot/active block commit?
2. How to update qemu to the version that supports live disk snapshot/active block commit ?

rknichols · 06-20-2018, 09:11 AM

RHEL strives for stability and will not usually move to a different major release of a package during the lifetime of an RHEL major release. You can find qemu-common-2.0.0 and related packages in the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repo. See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL. That's an official, supported repo managed by fedoraproject.

czezz · 06-25-2018, 06:07 AM

Hi Rknichols,
thank you for this information.

Basically that answers my question/explains the problem.
Stability/safety first... though qemu-kvm-1.5.3 seems to be waaaay long time ago outdated.

czezz · 06-28-2018, 02:44 AM

What is the difference between qemu-common and qemu-kvm-common ?

What I understand from my google research:
- qemu is HW emulator
- qemu-kvm is virtualizer that provides hardware emulation for the KVM hypervisor

Is that correct understanding?