My name is Julien Grall.  I joined the Citrix Open Source team few months ago to work on Xen on ARM with Ian Campbell and Stefano Stabellini. Since Citrix has joined the Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG), I’m also part of the virtualization team which takes care of Xen, KVM and QEMU within Linaro.
A couple of weeks ago, I have attended my first Linaro Connect Europe, held in Dublin from 8th to 12th of July.  All the major players in the ARM world came together to discuss the future of the industry and build an healthy Open Source ecosystem for ARM.
On Tuesday morning, the day of the technical preview of Xen on ARM, a Xen session was held by Stefano Stabellini, Ian Campbell and Leif Lindholm (Linaro). Unlike the Xen on ARM session at Linaro Connect Asia, we talked about on-going work for Xen 4.4 on ARM.
A couple of days of meetings with the LEG virtualization team and productive hacking sessions in the afternoon followed. With the help of ARM guys, Ian managed to fix process crash with an SMP guest during that time.
After a full week of conferences, meetings and social events, the Linaro Connect ended by a serie of demos. We showed, for the first time in public, the tiniest cloud ever, based on Xen on ARM with Open Nebula. It was composed of 2 different boards: a Versatile Express and an Arndale board.
To build the demo Open Nebula provided us with a pre-release. Javier Fontan describes this version as:
The OpenNebula version used in the demo is extracted from our development branch. It sports new Xen drivers that use xl/xenlight as the communication interface with Xen hypervisor. These drivers were made in the recent Xen Hackathon held in Dublin past May with the help of some Xen developers. The OpenNebula code was also modified so it is possible to compile it on ARM platforms. These changes are being polished and will be available in the next OpenNebula release (4.2).
Here’s the official video of the demo, directly from the Linaro Youtube channel:
To conclude, I really enjoyed this Linaro Connect. I was really impressed to see the high quality of each session, where everyone can share their point of view on how to build the best ecosystem for ARM.