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Xen roadmap hints

Xen Project chairperson Lars Kurth has revealed some future directions for the open source virtualisation project.

In a new Q&A to mark the recent 4.7 release, Kurth said he expects future versions will continue to offer big revisions to core features.

“Some new capabilities, such as restartable Dom0’s, and additional techniques to provide more isolation and security, are also likely to appear,” he said. “In addition, it looks likely that we will see some GPU virtualization capabilities for GPUs that target the ARM ecosystem, although it is not yet clear whether these will be available as open source. I also expect that both Intel and ARM hardware features will be closely tracked.

“Some areas, such as new schedulers, XSM, PVH and Live Patching, will see significant efforts to harden and improve existing functionality. The goal is to ensure their swift adoption in commercial products and Linux and BSD distributions. Some features, which are not enabled by default are likely to become part of the Xen Project Hypervisor’s default configuration.”

Kurth also revealed that Star Lab, Bosch and Netflix have become prominent contributors to the project. The latter company “improved and secured the VPMU feature, which is incredibly useful for system tuning and performance monitoring. Bosch's car multimedia arm “added some new ARM functionality.” Kurth said plenty of folks are now working on Xen for use in “... many different use cases emerging, including automotive, aviation, embedded scenarios, security, and also IoT.” ®

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