Last weekend Linus Torvalds pulled the Xen on ARM patches in his Linux tree, so as of Saturday the 7th of October, we have Xen ARM in upstream Linux!
This makes Xen the first hypervisor supported by Linux on the ARM platform!
Working on ARM has been a very pleasant experience for me: the documentation of the hardware is well written and complete, the virtualization extensions are useful and fit our architecture very well, the ARM emulator comes with a nice debugger that helped me figure out some of the most difficult problems I had.
But beyond the hardware and the development tools, I was really impressed by how welcoming the Linux ARM Community has been to me: from the invite to the ARM session at the Kernel Summit, to the guidance through the upstreaming process and in general the feedback I received to my work. Nowadays, the Linux Community is usually perceived as not being friendly to newcomers, but it hasn’t certainly been the case for me! In particular I would like to thanks Arnd Bergmann, Marc Zyngier, and the Linaro folks. It has been great working with you. I would also like to thank Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk because he went out of his way to help me upstream my ARM work: I couldn’t have done it without him.
As the Xen on ARM patches were pulled by Linus, I was also appointed as Xen ARM maintainer in the Linux kernel. This is a new responsibility for me and I am not going to take it lightly. I am looking forward to work closely with Arnd, Russell, Konrad and the other Linux maintainers to make Linux the best operating system to run virtual machines and inside virtual machines on Xen on ARM!
What’s next
While Xen on ARM in Linux is certainly a major milestone, there are still a lot of things to do. Right now I am busy trying to run Xen on a Cortex A15 Versatile Express development platform while Ian Campbell already started the ARMv8 Xen port!
Stay tuned if you want to run Xen 64-bit on ARM.
See Also
If you are interested in the Xen on ARM project, you might want to read the slides of the presentation I gave at XenSummit 2012:
