---
layout: post
author: KubeVirt Maintainers
title: You wanted more? It's KubeVirt v1.4! 
description: Introducing the KubeVirt v1.4 release
navbar_active: 
pub-date: November 12
pub-year: 2024
category: news
tags:
  [
    "KubeVirt",
    "v1.4",
    "release",
    "community",
    "cncf",
    "milestone",
    "party time"
  ]

---

The KubeVirt Community is proud to announce the release of [v1.4](https://github.com/kubevirt/kubevirt/releases/tag/v1.4.0). This release aligns with [Kubernetes v1.31](https://kubernetes.io/blog/2024/08/13/kubernetes-v1-31-release/) and is the sixth KubeVirt release to follow the Kubernetes release cadence. 

What's 1/3 of one thousand? Because that's how many people have [contributed in some way](https://kubevirt.devstats.cncf.io/d/66/developer-activity-counts-by-companies?orgId=1&var-period_name=v1.3.0%20-%20now&var-metric=contributions&var-repogroup_name=All&var-country_name=All&var-companies=All) to this release, with 90 of those 333 people [contributing commits to our repos](https://kubevirt.devstats.cncf.io/d/66/developer-activity-counts-by-companies?orgId=1&var-period_name=v1.3.0%20-%20now&var-metric=commits&var-repogroup_name=All&var-country_name=All&var-companies=All). 

You can read the full [release notes](https://kubevirt.io/user-guide/release_notes/#v140) in our user-guide, but we have included some highlights in this blog.

For those of you at KubeCon this week, be sure to check out our [maintainer talk](https://sched.co/1hoy6) where our project maintainers will be going into these and other recent enhancements in KubeVirt. 

### Feature GA
This release marks the graduation of a number of features to GA; deprecating the feature gate and now enabled by default:

- [Network hotplug](https://kubevirt.io/user-guide/network/hotplug_interfaces/#hotplug-network-interfaces): Add network interfaces to, and remove them from, running virtual machines.
- [Common Instance types](https://kubevirt.io/user-guide/user_workloads/instancetypes/): Simplify virtual machine creation with a predefined set of resource, performance, and runtime settings. We have also introduced a single configurable for cluster admins to explicitly disable this feature if required.
- [NUMA](https://deploy-preview-840--kubevirt-user-guide.netlify.app/compute/numa/): Improving performance by mapping host NUMA topology to virtual machine topology.
- [GPU assignment](https://deploy-preview-840--kubevirt-user-guide.netlify.app/compute/host-devices/#host-devices-assignment): An oldie but a goodie: Assign GPUs and vGPUs to virtual machines.

This version of KubeVirt includes upgraded virtualization technology based on [libvirt 10.5.0](https://www.libvirt.org/news.html#v10-5-0-2024-07-01) and [QEMU 9.0.0](https://www.qemu.org/2024/04/23/qemu-9-0-0/). Other KubeVirt-specific features of this release include the following:

### Virtualization
In the interest of security, we have restricted the [ability of virt-handler](https://github.com/kubevirt/kubevirt/pull/11982) to patch nodes, and removed privileges for the cluster. You can also now [live-update tolerations](https://github.com/kubevirt/kubevirt/pull/13090) to a running VM.

Our KubeVirt command line tool, virtctl, also received some love and [improved functionality](https://kubevirt.io/user-guide/release_notes/ba#sig-compute) for VM creation, image upload, and source inference.

### Networking
The networking binding plugins have matured to Beta, and we have a new domain attachment type,[`managedTap`](https://github.com/kubevirt/kubevirt/pull/13024), and the ability to [reserve memory overhead](https://github.com/kubevirt/kubevirt/pull/12235) for binding plugins. [Network binding plugins](https://kubevirt.io/user-guide/network/network_binding_plugins/) enable vendors to provide their own VM-to-network plumbing alongside KubeVirt.

We also added support for the `igb` network interface model.

### Storage
If you've ever wanted to migrate your virtual machine volume from one storage type to another then you'll be interested in our [volume migration](https://kubevirt.io/user-guide/storage/volume_migration/) feature.

### Scale and Performance
Our SIG scale and performance team have added performance benchmarks for resource utilization of virt-controller and virt-api components. Furthermore, the test-suite was enhanced by [integrating KWOK with SIG-scale tests](https://github.com/kubevirt/kubevirt/pull/12117) to simulate nodes and VMIs to test KubeVirt performance while using minimum resources in test infrastructure. A comprehensive list of performance and scale benchmarks for the release is available [here](https://github.com/kubevirt/kubevirt/blob/main/docs/perf-scale-benchmarks.md).

### Thanks!
A lot of work from a huge amount of people go into these releases. Some contributions are small, such as raising a bug or attending our community meeting, and others are massive, like working on a feature or reviewing PRs. Whatever your part: we thank you. 

And if you're interested in contributing to the project and being a part of the next release, please check out our [contributing guide](https://kubevirt.io/user-guide/contributing/) and our [community membership guidelines](https://github.com/kubevirt/community/blob/main/membership_policy.md).
