KubeVirt v1.9.0 release

[Federico Fossemo]

Hi everyone!

The Kubevirt Team is happy to announce the availability of KubeVirt v1.9.0!

This release follows v1.9.0.

The source code and selected binaries are available for download at: https://github.com/kubevirt/kubevirt/releases/tag/v1.9.0

The primary release artifact of KubeVirt is the git tree. The release tag is signed and can be verified using `git tag -v v1.9.0`

Pre-built containers are published on Quay and can be viewed at: https://quay.io/kubevirt/.

This release brings several feature gates to GA (VMExport, Persistent Reservation, IBM Secure Execution, among others) and enables all Beta gates by default.

Notable new alpha features include cross-architecture virtualization, a declarative Plugin CRD, IOMMUFD and GraceIOVirtualization for modern GPU passthrough, 

DRA-based SR-IOV networking, and OCI artifact export. 

Key enhancements include zstd compression and smarter stall detection for live migration, vGPU live migration, incremental backup pull mode, and a new serviceAccountName field on VMI spec. 

cgroup v1 support has been deprecated with removal planned for v1.10.

All the new commits can be looked at by running

$ git log v1.8.4.. v1.9.0

Thanks to everyone in the community for another release!

Greetings,

The KubeVirt Team