Xen Project ships version 4.15 with Focus on Broader Accessibility, Performance, and Security – WFMZ Allentown

SAN FRANCISCO, April 8, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- TheXen Project, an open source hypervisor hosted atthe Linux Foundation, today announced the release of Xen Project Hypervisor 4.15, which introduces a variety of features allowing for improved performance, security and device pass-through reliability. 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, VirtIO for Xen and Xen RISC-V port, continue to make valuable progress.

"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."

Notable Features

Community Initiative Updates

Functional Safety Update

Progress continues to be made within the Functional Safety SIG. Specifications are becoming more concrete and the group is working with other communities to establish standards. Additionally, Xen is working with other projects to converge best practices across communities.

Updates include:

Additionally, the Xen Project will be presenting, "Safety certification in the open: How the Xen project is making progress to achieve certification," at Embedded IoT World on April 28 at 3:00 pm PT.

VirtIO drivers for Xen:

Progress includes:

"Hyperlaunch"

"Dom0less" pioneered the ability to configure Xen to launch a static set of virtual machines by Xen at boot time. But configuration for these domains was very basic, and focused on embedded use cases. "Hyperlaunch" is a new initiative that intends to make this configuration far more flexible by generalizing it and introducing a "boot domain" (domB). Draft design documents have been posted, and a working group has been formed to form a plan to complete iron out the details.

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.

Progress includes:

Community Quotes

AMD

"With the 4.15 release, The Xen Project Hypervisor builds on long history of innovative open-source engineering. Xen support is an important part of the AMD EPYC processor software ecosystem. With support for the 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, Xen users can access the latest innovations in performance and scalability. We congratulate the Xen Project on their continued progress." Robert Gomer, Director, Global Software Alliances, AMD

Citrix

"The Xen project sits at the core of Citrix Hypervisor, and 4.15 will offer us the ability to continue to support modern processor architectures and deliver improved performance and stability to our customers," said Ben Chalmers, Manager 2, Engineering at Citrix.

EPAM

"The Xen Project continues to make great progress in areas of documentation systematization, implementation of defensive programming guidelines, such as MISRA, and support of VirtIO on Arm as a standardized I/O virtualization framework," said Alex Agizim, CTO, Automotive & Embedded,EPAM Systems. "Leveraging the open source Xen-based framework, EPAM's automotive team is helping design safety-focused solutions for our clients. Further, as one of the leaders in Xen's FuSa SiG, we're excited to see what the future brings, as vehicles become more seamlessly integrated with the connected services ecosystem."

SUSE

"Our collaboration in the Xen hypervisor community project continues to deliver a featureful and reliable base for our products, said Claudio Fontana, Engineering Manager Virtualization, SUSE Labs Core. "With this new release we are happy to see new Enterprise features becoming available, like the Xenstore Live Update we spearheaded, which is another step in addressing single points of failure in host maintenance, but we also recognize the excellent constant, meticulous work of the community to increase code quality, and thus prepare for exciting and sustainable feature development in the future."

Vates

"As an Open Source company using Xen at the core of its products, Vates is really happy to see this new release available. Our increasing collaboration with the Xen Project through XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra is bringing new exciting initiatives including Xen port to RISC-V and VirtIO drivers for Xen, but also sharing benefits now of an improved code base on a mature platform that we can trust in terms of security and stability," said Olivier Lambert, co-founder and Vates CEO

Adds Charles Schulz, Chief Strategy Officer at Vates, "Xen is ideally suited for the broadest range of use cases. It provides performance, security, isolation and portability to datacenters, embedded and edge-of-the-network workloads alike. As such it is the ideal virtualization stack for hybrid cloud, cybersecurity and edge use case. Vates is committed to a long-term contribution and support of the Xen Project and looks forward to its growth and renewed adoption across the ecosystem."

Xilinx

Xilinx continues to believe that the Xen Project is a key component of our long-term strategy in the Automotive market segment. With Xilinx's leadership on the Xen Project Functional Safety Special Interest Group, Xen Project is addressing key areas of concern for functional safety customers. The Xen FuSa SIG has identified the MISRA-C rules that apply to the Xen Project as well as best practices for performing static analysis of relevant violations. There is also progress on automated generation of documentation safety artifacts and cross-linking into the Xen Project codebase. These enhancements will make customers with functional safety requirements more productive and allow them to bring their solutions to market sooner.

Additional Resources

Release Info

Downloads

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.

Media Contact

Rachel Romoff

rromoff@linuxfoundation.org

210-241-8284

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Xen Project ships version 4.15 with Focus on Broader Accessibility, Performance, and Security - WFMZ Allentown