Re: DRAFT: Xen 4.16 release blog post

[Roger Pau Monné <roger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 12:20:37PM +0100, Roger Pau Monné wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Below is the starting draft for the Xen 4.16 release blog post.
> 
> Note it has a bunch of XXX to be filled with new information.
> "Community Initiative Updates" listed projects is subject to changes
> as we gather more information.

New draft, with the RISC-V and FuSa sections filled:

XEN PROJECT SHIPS VERSION 4.16 WITH FOCUS ON IMPROVED PERFORMANCE SECURITY AND 
HARDWARE SUPPORT.

NEW VERSION INTRODUCES ARM VIRTUAL PERFORMANCE MONITOR COUNTERS AND BROADER X86 
HARDWARE SUPPORT. COMMUNITY INITIATIVES, INCLUDING FUNCTIONAL SAFETY AND 
VIRTIO, CONTINUE TO PROGRESS.

The Xen Project, an open source hypervisor hosted at the Linux Foundation, 
today announced the release of Xen Project Hypervisor 4.16, which introduces a 
variety of features allowing for improved performance, security, functionality 
and hardware support. The Xen Project community continues to be active and 
engaged, with a wide range of developers from many companies and organizations 
contributing to this latest release. Additionally, community-wide initiatives, 
including Functional Safety and VirtIO for Xen, continue to make valuable 
progress.

XXX: "Xen Project continues to be a mature, open source hypervisor well suited 
for enterprise use cases that require security and high levels of performance. 
In addition to the incredible work that went into this release, I’m also 
pleased with the multiple community initiatives the Xen Project continues to 
drive forward and contribute to."
XXX: replace with something new

Notable Features

* Miscellaneous fixes to the TPM manager software in preparation for TPM 2.0 
support.

* Increased reliance on the PV shim as 32bit PV guests will only be supported 
in shim mode going forward. Such change reduces the surface of attack in the 
hypervisor.

* Increased hardware support by allowing Xen to boot on Intel devices that lack 
a Programmable Interval Timer.

* Cleanup of legacy components by no longer building QEMU Traditional or 
PV-Grub by default. Note both projects have upstream Xen support merged now, so 
it is no longer recommended to use the Xen specific forks.

* Improved support for the Gitlab automated tests: 32bit Arm builds and full 
system tests for x86.

* Initial support for guest virtualized Performance Monitor Counters on Arm.

* Improved support for dom0less mode by allowing the usage on Arm 64bit 
hardware with EFI firmware.

* Improved support for Arm 64bit heterogeneous systems by leveling the CPU 
features across all cores in order to improve big.LITTLE support.

Community Initiative Updates

Functional Safety Update

In collaboration with the Zephyr project and the MISRA consortium, the Xen FuSa
Special Interest Group analyzed MISRA C rules in depth and defined a subset of
rules that apply to Xen and will be tackled with the community. The SIG
evaluated several static code analyzers to scan the Xen code base for MISRA C
violations. The team started enhancing the Xen build system with the ability to
run open source MISRA C checkers as part of the Xen build, so that for future
releases Xen contributors will be able to easily improve the quality of their
patches.

VirtIO drivers for Xen:

XXX: to be provided

RISC-V Port:

RISC-V, an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on
established reduced instruction set computer (RISC) principles, is a free and
open ISA enabling hardware designers to design simpler chips with a
royalty-free ISA. The Xen community, led by sub-project XCP.ng, is working on a
RISC-V Port for Xen.

During this release cycle significant work has been ongoing internally in order
to get dom0 booting on RISC-V hardware, focusing on introducing the
functionality to allow interrupt management, together with other interfaces
required for early boot code.

Community Quotes

XXX: to be provided

* AMD
* Citrix
* EPAM
* SUSE
* Vates
* Xilinx

About the Xen Project
Xen Project software is an open source virtualization platform licensed under 
the GPLv2 with a similar governance structure to the Linux kernel. Designed 
from the start for cloud computing, the Project has more than a decade of 
development and is being used by more than 10 million users. A project at The 
Linux Foundation, the Xen Project community is focused on advancing 
virtualization in a number of different commercial and open source applications 
including server virtualization, Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS), desktop 
virtualization, security applications, embedded and hardware appliances. It 
counts many industries and open source community leaders among its members 
including Amazon Web Services, Arm, Bitdefender, Citrix, EPAM Systems. For more 
information about the Xen Project software and to participate, please visit 
XenProject.org.

AMD, the AMD logo, EPYC, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced 
Micro Devices, Inc.

Intel, the Intel logo and Xeon are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its 
subsidiaries in the U.S. and/or other countries.

About Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members 
and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open 
standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are 
critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, 
and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best 
practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution 
providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more 
information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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