The Xen Project hypervisor has relied on a special virtual machine, Dom0, to perform privileged operations since the early days of the project. Dom0 has always been the very first environment to come up at boot time, providing a familiar Linux command line interface for the users. With Dom0-less, we
Xen on ARM is becoming more and more widespread in embedded environments. In these contexts, Xen is employed as a single solution to partition the system into multiple domains, fully isolated from each other, and with different levels of trust. Every embedded scenario is different, but many require real-time guarantees.
Let’s take a step back and look at the current state of virtualization in the software industry. X86 hypervisors were built to run a few different operating systems on the same machine. Nowadays they are mostly used to execute several instances of the same OS (Linux), each running a
A little more than a week ago at Linaro Connect SFO15 in Burlingame Jim Perrin of the CentOS project publicly announced the availability of the Xen hypervisor in CentOS 7 for ARM64 (also known as aarch64). Jim and I have been working closely with George Dunlap, maintainer of Xen in
Docker is certainly the most influential open source project of the moment. Why is Docker so successful? Is it going to replace Virtual Machines? Will there be a big switch? If so, when? Let’s look at the past to understand the present and predict the future. Before virtual machines,
It all started with pvgrub2: it was March 2015 and I wanted to add grub2 to the Xen build system. We were already building grub-legacy as part of the Xen build, so that we could produce a pvgrub binary to be used to boot PV guests. After Vladimir ‘phcoder‘ Serbinenko’
With Xen on ARM getting out of the early preview phase and becoming more mature, it is time to run a few benchmarks to check that the design choices paid out, the architecture is sound and the code base is solid. It is time to find out how much is
The following monologue explains how Linux drivers are able to program a device when running in a Xen virtual machine on ARM. The problem that needs to be solved is that Xen on ARM guests run with second stage translation in hardware enabled. That means that what the Linux kernel
For the last several years, the Xen developer community has been increasing its ability to collaborate well with other projects. We succeeded in finally getting the necessary infrastructure for dom0 support into Linux in 2011. We have upstreamed the most important changes to QEMU, and will be using an upstream
Two weeks ago today was the first day of Linaro Connect Asia: the event was held at the Gold Coast Hotel in Hong Kong and was similar in format and attendance to the previous one in Copenhagen. All the major players in the ARM world came together to speak about
A couple of weeks ago I went to Copenhagen to attend Linaro Connect and Ubuntu Developer Summit for the first time. I was really impressed by the size of the conference, I wasn’t expecting so many people, it certainly rivals LinuxCon in terms of attendance. All the best minds
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