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Xen Project Releases Version 4.17 with Enhanced Security, Higher Performance, Improved Embedded Static Configuration and Speculative Mitigation SupportThe Xen Project, an open source hypervisor hosted at the Linux Foundation, today announced the release of Xen Project Hypervisor 4.17, which introduces a variety of features allowing for safety certification, static partitioning of embedded devices, increased performance, enhanced security and improved device pass-through reliability. Thanks to the active Xen Project community, a wide range of developers from many companies and organizations contributed to this latest release. "We are pleased to see the Xen Project community behind this proven open source hypervisor, making it the ideal choice for enterprise use cases that require advanced security features and high levels of performance," said George Dunlap, chairman of the Xen Project Advisory Board. "We will continue to expand the community initiatives the Xen Project leads and contributes to, as we work together with industry leaders and innovators." Notable Features
VirtIO: VirtIO-Grant is VirtIO drivers using grant operations. In contrast to VirtIO-MMIO, which does direct map, virtio-grant is safer and also supports driver domains. VirtIO-Grant support has been implemented and upstreamed in Linux at the transport level. There are patches to enable it in QEMU backends and in virtio-vhost, but these have not yet been upstreamed, nor is there toolstack support (libxl / xl) yet. Both x86 and ARM will be included in the next few releases. Hyperlaunch The vision for Hyperlaunch is to enable complete, flexible configuration of a system of running VMs at boot time, suitable for "measured launch." The first batch of functionality has been implemented, and patches sent to the list; this enables multiple PV domains to be specified, with their images handed to the hypervisor at boot. Everything necessary for these domains to come up, including the Xenstore entries required for PV devices to function, is implemented. Once the patch is upstreamed, we will be adding support for PVH devices and HVM devices for a pure "static configuration" mode (where no new domains can be created after boot), along with support for a "domB" builder domain, capable of setting up arbitrary domain configurations in a fashion suitable for measured boot. Community Quotes AMD / Xilinx "AMD looks forward to embracing the further improvements found in the latest release of the Xen hypervisor," said Kris Chaplin, senior technical marketing manager, AMD. "The MISRA C compliance rules-checking and enhanced support of dom0less configurations in this release help pave the way to a future in safety certified environments and will further the appeal of Xen to our communities, partners, and customers." Citrix "XenServer (formerly Citrix Hypervisor) is a cost-effective enterprise grade hypervisor used for both Desktop- and Server Virtualization workloads. XenServer inherits its security and performance from the Xen Project hypervisor with the 4.17 release providing increased security and performance for key workloads," stated Jacus de Beer, general manager, XenServer BU, Cloud Software Group. EPAM "Support of VirtIO on ARM as a standardized I/O virtualization framework and placing thin Zephyr RTOS in control domain are important to build portable and safety-compliant compute systems in automotive," said Alex Agizim, CTO, Automotive & Embedded, EPAM Systems. Vates "The various security and hardening improvements, as well as the renewed focus on the ARM and RISC V ports are a great step in the right direction and show that the Xen Project continues to innovate much beyond its traditional use cases. We see this as a great potential for future innovation," added Olivier Lambert, CEO of Vates. Star Lab Software "It was critical for Star Lab to support the development of the hyperlaunch capability for Xen." said Adam Fraser, COO at Star Lab Corp. "We believe this will kickstart more development and help the community reduce the attack surface of Xen, a technology relied on by organizations around world." Additional Resources Visit these pages for Release Info and 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, and AMD / Xilinx. 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.
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