Software-update: Xen 4.7 / 4.6.3

Xen is een 'virtuele machine-hypervisor' voor het x86- en ARM-platform en laat diverse besturingssystemen gelijktijdig op één systeem draaien zonder de prestaties drastisch te beïnvloeden. Voor meer informatie over Xen en de bijbehorende community verwijzen we naar deze en deze pagina. Op dit moment worden alleen Linux, NetBSD en FreeBSD als hostsystemen ondersteund, maar men is druk bezig om ook andere besturingssystemen volledig te ondersteunen. De ontwikkelaars hebben enkele dagen geleden Xen 4.7 en 4.6.3 uitgebracht, met de volgende aankondiging:

Xen Project Hypervisor 4.7

This new release focuses on improving code quality, security hardening, security features, live migration support, usability improvements and support for new hardware features — this is also the first release of our fixed term June – December release cycle.

We continue to strive to make Xen Project Hypervisor the most secure open source hypervisor to match the security challenges in cloud computing, and for embedded and IoT use-cases. We are continuing to improve upon the performance and scalability for our users, and aim to continuously bring many new features to our users in a timely manner.

Security Features

• Reboot-free Live Patching
• KCONFIG support
• Improvements to the Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI) subsystem
• Foundation work to tolerate a restartable Dom0

Migration Support

• Improved Migration support
• Fault Tolerance / Coarse-grained Lock-stepping (COLO)

Performance and Workloads

• Support for a wider range of workloads and applications
• Improved Credit 2 scheduler
• Improved RTDS scheduler
• Per-cpu reader-writer lock

Usability Improvements

• PVUSB Support
• Hot plugging of QEMU disk backends
• Soft-reset

New Hardware Support

• Features specific to the ARM Architecture
  • SBBR Compliance
  • PCSI 1.0 Compatibility
  • vGIC-v3
  • Wallclock support
• Features specific to Intel® Xeon® processor product family
  • Improved Interrupt Efficiency
  • Code and Data Prioritization
  • Other Intel Features: VMX TSC Scaling, which allows for easier migration between machines with different CPU frequencies and support for Memory Protection Keys, a new security feature for hardening the software stack.

Drivers and Devices (Linux, FreeBSD and other)

During the Xen Project 4.7 release cycle, we made significant improvements to major operating systems and components we rely on to improve interoperability. During this development cycle 1494 Xen Project only related changesets – mostly bug fixes and small improvements – were applied to Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, QEMU and the Windows PV drivers: more than twice as many as in the 4.6 release cycle.

Summary

With dozens of major improvements, many more bug fixes and small improvements, and significant improvements to Drivers and Devices, Xen Project 4.7 reflects a thriving community around the Xen Project Hypervisor.

We are extremely proud of achieving the highest quality of the release while increasing development velocity across the hypervisor and its upstream dependencies by about 16%. In particular, our latest security related features enable Xen Project software to compete in the security appliance market and help answer some of the difficult questions regarding security in the cloud era.

We set out at the beginning of this release cycle to foster greater collaboration among vendors, individual developers, upstream maintainers, other projects and distributions. During this release cycle we continued to see an increasing influx of patches and newcomers such as Star Lab, Bosch and Netflix. We had a significant amount of contributions from cloud providers, software vendors, hardware vendors, academic researchers and individuals to help with this release. Major contributors for this particular release come from Citrix, SUSE, Intel, Star Lab, Oracle, Linaro, Fujitsu, Bitdefender, Red Hat, Huawei, ARM, Novetta, Broadcom, Xilinx, Bosch, AMD, GlobalLogic, NSA, Netflix and a number of universities and individuals. Thank you to all who participated.

As the release manager, I would like to thank everyone for their contributions (either in the form of patches, bug reports or packaging efforts) to the Xen Project. This release wouldn’t have happened without contributions from so many people around the world. Please check out our 4.7 contributor acknowledgement page.

The source can be located in the http://xenbits.xen.org/gitweb/?p=xen.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/stable-4.7 tree (tag RELEASE-4.7.0) or can be downloaded as tarball from our website.

Xen Project Hypervisor 4.6.3

The Xen Project 4.6.3 release is a maintenance release which comprises bug fixes and security updates. This is release is available immediately from its git repository http://xenbits.xen.org/gitweb/?p=xen.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/stable-4.6 (tag RELEASE-4.6.3) or from the Xen Project download page http://www.xenproject.org/downloads/xen-archives/xen-46-series/xen-463.html (where a list of changes can also be found).

We recommend all users of the 4.6 stable series which do not wish to upgrade to Xen 4.7, to update to this latest point release.