Join 4.6 Release Candidate Testing on September 1, 2015 Although the Xen Project performs automated testing through the project’s Test Lab, we also depend on manual testing of release candidates by our users. Our Test Days help insure that upcoming releases are ready for production. It is
And by “a ride”, we actually mean a ride. Like this:  Like, will Xen run in your car? Well, it appears it will! It all started with ARM Support In fact, Xen Project developers started woking on supporting the ARM architecture (with hardware virtualization capabilities) a couple of
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
Some time ago Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk (the Xen Linux maintainer) came up with a list of possible improvements to the Xen PV block protocol, which is used by Xen guests to reduce the overhead of emulated disks. This document is quite long, and the list of possible improvements is also
The “Normal†Case To explain what is a Stub-Domain (often called stubdom), let’s start with the basics. When you start a new guest with Xen, you would need a Device Model which does some emulation if the guest does not have PV drivers. This is the case for
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
This post written collaboratively by Attilio Rao and George Dunlap Operating systems are generally written assuming that they are in direct control of the hardware. So when we run operating systems in virtual machines, where they share the hardware with other operating systems, this can sometimes cause problems. One of
If you are upgrading domain 0 Linux kernel from a non-pvops (classic, 2.6.18/2.6.32/etc.) kernel to a pvops one (3.0 or later), you may find that the amount of free memory inside dom0 has decreased significantly. This is because of changes in the
On March 18th, Linux 3.3 was released and it featured a number of interesting Xen related features. * Re-engineered how tools can perform hypercalls – by using a standard interface (/dev/xen/privcmd instead of using /proc/xen/privcmd) * Backends (netback, blkback) can now function in HVM mode. This means that
Linux 3.2 Linux 3.2 was released on Jan 4th and compared to earlier kernel releases, this one was very focused on fixing bugs reported by the community. Thank you!! Issues that caused lots of bug reports were: * The xen-platform-pci module (used for HVM guest to enable PV drivers)
About a year ago (https://lkml.org/lkml/2010/6/4/272) my first patchset that laid the ground work to enable initial domain (dom0) was accepted in the Linux kernel. It was tiny: a total of around 50 new lines of code added. Great, except that it took me
This is a very short blog post as both Wim Coekaert and Ewan Mellor beat me by some time in publishing this great news: I was too busy traveling and celebrating. The fantastic news is that Linux 3.0 will have everything necessary to run Xen as both as a