Open-source hypervisor hosted at the Linux Foundation, the Xen Project, announced the release of Xen Project Hypervisor 4.15. The latest version introduces a variety of features allowing for improved performance, security, and device pass-through reliability.
The Xen Project also stated that the community continues to be active and engaged, with a wide range of developers from many companies and organizations contributing. In addition, community-wide initiatives, including Functional Safety, VirtIO for Xen, and Xen RISC-V port, continue to make valuable progress.
Notable Features:
- Arm now allows running device models in dom0 (tech preview), allowing arbitrary devices to be emulated for Arm guests. Arm also now has SMMUv3 support (also tech preview), which will improve security and reliability of device pass-through on Arm systems.
- Xen can now export Intel Processor Trace (IPT) data from guests to tools in dom0, enabling tools like VMI Kernel Fuzzer for Xen Project or DRAKVUF Sandbox.
- Xen now supports Viridian enlightenments for guests with more than 64 vcpus.
- Xenstored and oxenstored both now support LiveUpdate (tech preview), allowing security fixes to be applied without having to restart the entire host.
- “PV Shim” mode, for supporting legacy PV guests on HVM-only systems, continues to be improved; its size was reduced by further factoring out HVM-specific code. This will also help reduce the size and security of any PV-only build of the hypervisor.
- Unified boot images: It is now possible to create an image bundling together files needed for Xen to boot into a single EFI binary; making it now possible to boot a functional Xen system directly from the EFI boot manager, rather than having to go through grub multiboot. Files that can be bundled include a hypervisor, dom0 kernel, dom0 initrd, Xen KConfig, XSM configuration, and a device tree.