porting master to release

@Praburaj @glennc 

Porting master to release since it was behind in terms of commits. Will be adding more updates to release branch later and merging to master for beta2
I think this might break `kvm alias` with the full package name because `_kvm_requested_platform` resolves the full package name. Try running `kvm alias <alias> <full_package_name>` and see if it works