RHEA-2011:1614 - Product Enhancement Advisory

Topic

An updated virt-viewer package that fixes several bugs and adds one enhancement
is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Description

Virtual Machine Viewer (virt-viewer) is a lightweight interface for interacting
with the graphical display of a virtualized quest. It uses libvirt and is
intended as a replacement for traditional VNC clients.

The virt-viewer package has been upgraded to upstream version 0.4.1, which
provides support for The Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments
(SPICE) multihead setups. (BZ#680213)

This update also fixes the following bugs:

• Running the virt-viewer utility with the "--verbose" or "-v" option did not

display verbose information. With this update, additional data has been provided
so that the command outputs detailed information. (BZ#680331)

• Previously, the virt-viewer utility failed to connect to remote displays when

using SSH tunneling with the SSH server on a non-standard port number. An
upstream patch has been applied to address this issue and virt-viewer now
correctly displays remote quests. (BZ#730346)

• Previously, running the "virt-viewer --zoom" command with a zoom level

specified did not work correctly. This update fixes the initial zoom level on a
display, and the primary window zoom level is now propagated to secondary
windows. As a result, the zoom option works as expected. (BZ#730901)

• Using a wildcard address (for example, 0.0.0.0) as a listen address for the

graphic server could cause virt-viewer to fail to connect to remote virtual
machines. If the user used the "virt-viewer --direct --connect" command with a
remote IP address to connect a virtual machine, virt-viewer connected to the
graphic server but was not able to connect to the virtual machine. The hostname
is now used from the libvirt URI and virt-viewer can open remote virtual
machines successfully. (BZ#730911)

• Due to an invalid implementation of the libvirt events API, the virt-viewer

utility occasionally resulted in a deadlock. To avoid deadlock situations, ff
callbacks are now invoked from a clean stack instead of being called directly
from the remote callback. (BZ#731132)

• Previously, the window titles for virt-viewer instances did not contain the

name of the displayed guest, nor did they contain the number of guest displays
(for multihead setups). The source code has been modified so that the titles now
contain both the name of the guest and the number of displays. (BZ#739007)

• Guests are normally configured with their VNC (Virtual Network Computing)

server on a TCP socket, but can be also configured to use a UNIX domain socket
instead. Prior to this update, virt-viewer was unable to connect to such a guest
and terminated unexpectedly with a segmentation fault when attempting to open
it. A patch has been applied to address the issue and the virt-viewer utility
now opens guests successfully and no longer crashes. (BZ#740724)

• Due to certain broken key combinations, sending the Ctrl+Alt+F9 and

Ctrl+Alt+F10 key combinations incorrectly opened the tty4 and tty5 text consoles
in virt-viewer. This update fixes the broken key combinations and the text
console no longer opens when sending the aforementioned key combinations.
(BZ#744370)

• Previously, the window title was missing the guestname when waiting for a

domain to start. To fix this problem, the initial window title is set to the
"--wait" command line argument while waiting for a virtual machine to start.
When the machine actually appears, the title is updated to the real name of the
machine. (BZ#744374)

• With the SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments)

graphics, the virt-viewer windows did not display the "Press Ctrl+Alt to release
pointer" information. With this update, VirtViewerDisplaySpice is connected to
the grab signals in DisplaySpice, which ensures that the release sequence
message is now displayed. (BZ#744377)

Users are advised to upgrade to this updated virt-viewer package, which fixes
these bugs and adds this enhancement.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously-released errata relevant
to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red
Hat Network to apply this update are available at
https://access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-11259

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 6 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 6 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Scientific Computing 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support (for IBM z Systems) 6 s390x

Fixes

• BZ - 680213 - RFE: Rebase to 0.3.1 release to obtain SPICE support
• BZ - 680331 - virt-viewer --verbose doesn't display verbose information
• BZ - 730346 - Unable to connect to a display using ssh tunnelling
• BZ - 730901 - "virt-viewer --zoom" does not take effect.
• BZ - 730911 - 'virt-viewer --direct --connect' fails to connect remote vms.
• BZ - 731132 - Possible deadlock when disconnecting from libvirt
• BZ - 734769 - virt-viewer will reference a NULL pointer if URI parsing fails
• BZ - 739007 - Window title is missing the name of the guest
• BZ - 740724 - [Virt-viewer] virt-viewer could not open guest with unix sockets

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)