The Xen Project, an open source project under the Linux Foundation, announced the release of Xen Project 4.19. This release marks a significant milestone in enhancing performance, security, and versatility across various architectures, including Arm, PPC, RISC-V, and x86, altogether providing a robust and secure hypervisor solution for both enterprises and cloud providers.
The Xen Project continues to lead the way in virtualization technology. With contributions from a wide and diverse range of companies, including board members AMD, ARM, AWS, EPAM, Vates, and XenServer, Xen Project 4.19 introduces a range of key changes and improvements that solidify its position as a premier open-source virtualization platform. Comprehensive improvements include substantial enhancements in memory management, security, and system stability, spanning multiple architectures and benefitting a wide array of users and use cases.
“The 4.19 release is a significant achievement for the Xen community, bringing crucial enhancements across all supported architectures,” said Kelly Choi, Community Manager at the Xen Project. “New features such as the x2APIC driver for x86 and dynamic node programming for Arm highlight our focus on meeting the evolving needs of our users, and underscores our dedication to advancing virtualization technology with a robust, reliable and open source hypervisor.”
Notable Improvements in Release 4.19 Include:
Security Enhancements
- Published 13 new Xen Security Advisories (XSAs) to mitigate vulnerabilities.
- Adoption of additional MISRA-C rules for improved code quality.
Arm Architecture
- Introduction of dynamic node programming using overlay dtbo.
- FF-A notification support
x86 Architecture
- Introduce a new x2APIC driver that uses Cluster Logical addressing mode for IPIs and physical addressing mode for external interrupts.
- Deprecate support for XeonPhi in 4.19, with the firm plan to remove support in 4.20.
PVH
- PVH dom0 has now moved to “supported with caveats” status
- PVH/HVM can now map foreign pages, which should for example allow QEMU stubdomains to run as PVH
- Boot time speedup due to the IOMMU changes
- Don’t expose pIRQ support to HVM guests by default. The feature (XENFEAT_hvm_pirqs) can now be enabled on a per-domain basis
Other updates:
- Add a new 9pfs backend running as a daemon in dom0. First user is Xenstore-stubdom now being able to support full Xenstore trace capability.
- libxl support for backendtype=tap with tapback.
- Increase the maximum number of CPUs Xen can be built for from 4095 to 16383.
- When building with Systemd support (./configure –enable-systemd), remove libsystemd as a build dependency. Systemd Notify support is retained, now using a standalone library implementation.
- xenalyze no longer requires `–svm-mode` when analyzing traces generated on AMD CPUs.
- Code symbol annotations and MISRA compliance improvements.
- CI updates:
- Minimum fixes to rebuild the containers, following the HEREDOC problems.
- Rebuild containers to have testing with up-to-date LTS distros.
- Few build system checks, and strip the obsolete contents of the build containers.
The Xen Project 4.19 release underscores the community’s commitment to advancing virtualization technology.
