Community is everything at The Xen Project.
We spoke to Ayan, a dedicated community member who has been working on the Xen Project on his experience.
Why do you think open source is important?
Open source software (like Linux kernel, uboot, xen, trusted firmware, etc) is an integral part of the Petalinux BSP (which is based on Yocto) and I use this for my job, which is important.
Why Xen?
We use Xen as an example hypervisor to illustrate how to host different VMs on the same SoC. The key features of Xen (ie dom0less, static partitioning) help us to use it to partition and isolate the hardware resources. We use Xen’s passthrough mechanism to assign devices to specific VMs.
What does contributing mean to you?
Being an active contributor to the Xen project helps us to add new features in the upstream Xen which enables our SoCs to be used across a wide range of customers. For eg VirtIO, PCI passthrough, MPU support, and S3 suspend/resume are some of the ongoing features which should enable Xen to be widely used in the automotive and industrial domains.
The core aspect of Xen being open source means anyone will be able to use these latest features and can keep track of ongoing development. Besides, it gives an assurance of the quality of the software.
The advantage of upstreaming features is that your code will be tested on a daily basis and the community will help if they encounter some issues.
