Yesterday kvm-75 was released featuring ballooning thanks to KVM developer Anthony Liguori. Also included in this release are bug fixes and a couple of new features. Among the new features include support for 1280x768 video resolution when using the –std-vga option described here. The new resolution caters for the native resolution of some laptops.

The new ballooning feature comes with new commands added to the virtual machine monitor interface. This allows you to control the amount of memory your guest machine is using dynamically but with the guest deciding on what memory to evict. I did a preview of this feature here and will do another follow up post with an actual demonstration. The bios has also been updated to stabilize reboots of windows acpi guests.

The list of the change log from the development mailing list is shown below:

Changes from kvm-74:

- add 1280x768 std-vga resolution
- ballooning (Anthony Liguori)
- requires 2.6.27+ host to work correctly
- fix bad memory sizing on ia64 (Xiantao Zhang)
- restore option roms to their original content on reset
- fixes extboot failures after reset
- enable ia64 power manangement (Xiantao Zhang)
- add cld/std/cli/sti/clc instructions to testsuite (Mohammed Gamal)
- fix compile errors on hosts that lack MADV_DONTFORK
- avoid accessing CMOS NVRAM from ACPI AML (Gleb Natapov)
- fixes rare reboot failures with Windows
- fixes ACPI error messages in Windows event log
- add mp state for ia64 (Xiantao Zhang)
- add missing prototypes (Jes Sorensen)
- fix compiler warnings (Jes Sorensen)
- add in/out instructions to emulator (Mohammed Gamal)
- use Windows pcr instead of guest's tr for tpr patching cpu id
- fixes hibernate/resume with guest smp
- account for realmode/npt/ept page faults in statistics
- fix locking around dirty log tracking
- flush tlbs after fetching the dirty log
- fix random segfaults with npt (Joerg Roedel)
- fix setting accessed bit on non-speculative sptes
- fix tlb flush during page zap
- slightly optimize event injection with npt
- add MC5_MISC msr support (Joerg Roedel)
- fixes Linux bootup warnings
- make s390 facility bits future proof (Christian Borntraeger)
- improve s390 guest Kconfig help (Christian Borntraeger)
- add cld/std instructions to emulator (Mohammed Gamal)
- fix address overflow in ept (Sheng Yang)
- add statistic for guest irq injections
- remove unnecessary remote tlb flush (Joerg Roedel)
 

KVM-75 can be downloaded here.  Click here