Xen project Mailing List

Hi everyone,

As promised, the small text from Vates about the next Xen release:

"Vates welcomes this new Xen release as it continues adding significant improvements to its core technologies, like broader hardware support and increased security. This and several other notable improvements directly benefit the XCP-ng hypervisors and several other downstream software projects. It shows the Xen community is strong and committed to serious innovation" said Olivier Lambert, co-founder and Vates CEO. "The Xen project and its technologies increasingly show their strategic importance. Security, reliability, independence, the ability to run in the largest datacenters down to industrial PCs are becoming crucial elements of success for the future. Our efforts to port Xen on the RISC-V architecture and our recent commitment to the RISC-V foundation both display Vates' commitment to the Xen Project and the road ahead for Xen" said Charles Schulz, Chief Strategy Officer at Vates.

Regards,

On Friday, 11/26/2021, 12:49 PM, Bertrand Marquis wrote:

Hi Roger,

Due to internal delays to make a PR, arm will not be able to provide something in the delay (would take at least a week).

I will keep that in mind to request that earlier for next release.

Cheers
Bertrand

On 26 Nov 2021, at 08:38, Roger Pau Monné <roger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: The contents of this email and any attachments are confidential and may also be privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately and do not disclose the contents to any other person, use it for any purpose, or store or copy the information in any medium. Thank you.

Re: DRAFT: Xen 4.16 release blog post