Several Xen developers who currently work for Citrix recently announced they are porting the Xen hypervisor to the ARM processor architecture. The group's work began less than three months ago, but the port is said to already be capable of booting a Linux 3.0-based virtual machine.

The Xen port announcement was made on the Linux Kernel Mailing List by Stefano Stabellini, a senior software engineer on the XenServer team at Citrix, who has been working on Xen technology since 2007. He's joined on the project by several other developers, including fellow Citrix employees Ian Campbell and Tim Deegan, whose history goes back to the early days of Xen with the University of Cambridge and XenSource.

The development team said they wanted to find out how to best support ARM v7+ on Xen, and a few weeks ago they started hacking together a proof-of-concept hypervisor port to ARM's Cortex-A15 reference chip, which uses and requires the ARMv7 virtualization extensions.

In his announcement Stabellini wrote, "The port is based on xen-unstable (HG CS 8d6edc3d26d2) and written from scratch exploiting the latest virtualization, LPAE, GIC and generic timer support in hardware."

...MORE

Read the entire InfoWorld Virtualization Report article.