Issued:
2011-12-06
Updated:
2011-12-06

RHEA-2011:1614 - virt-viewer bug fix and enhancement update

Synopsis

virt-viewer bug fix and enhancement update

Type/Severity

Product Enhancement Advisory (none)

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 This content is not included.https://access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-11259

Affected Products

ProductVersionArch
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Scientific Computing6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian6ppc64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems6s390x
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation6i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server6i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI6i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support6i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension6i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension (for IBM z Systems)6s390x
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support (for IBM z Systems)6s390x
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop6i386

Updated Packages

  • virt-viewer-0.4.1-7.el6.src.rpm
  • virt-viewer-debuginfo-0.4.1-7.el6.x86_64.rpm
  • virt-viewer-0.4.1-7.el6.i686.rpm
  • virt-viewer-debuginfo-0.4.1-7.el6.s390x.rpm
  • virt-viewer-0.4.1-7.el6.s390x.rpm
  • virt-viewer-0.4.1-7.el6.x86_64.rpm
  • virt-viewer-debuginfo-0.4.1-7.el6.i686.rpm
  • virt-viewer-debuginfo-0.4.1-7.el6.ppc64.rpm
  • virt-viewer-0.4.1-7.el6.ppc64.rpm

Fixes

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)

Additional information