Blog - Xen Project

Xen at FOSDEM: Real-World Conversations About Xen and KVM

Cody Zuschlag — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 14:00:57 GMT

We just wrapped up a weekend at FOSDEM 2026 where Xen and XCP-ng both had dedicated booths. This was my first time at FOSDEM and the legend lived up to the hype.

It was an insightful weekend full of interesting folks who were genuinely interested in the Xen Project. Everything from folks who used Xen 20 years ago, folks who know Xen of today, and folks who had limited insight into why hypervisors are important.

By far, the most common question I received was, “How is Xen different from KVM or Proxmox?” Those are actually two separate questions, and they are worth taking one at a time.

First, Proxmox (Proxmox VE) is a virtualization solution built on top of the KVM hypervisor. Xen, on the other hand, is a hypervisor. To make a fair comparison with Proxmox, you really want to compare it with a Xen-based virtualization solution, such as XCP-ng. Under the hood, what we are really comparing is KVM versus Xen.

To compare these two hypervisor technologies, it helps to understand the different types of hypervisors: Type 1 and Type 2. A Type 2 hypervisor runs on top of a host operating system. Common examples include VirtualBox and Parallels.

In contrast, a Type 1 hypervisor runs directly on the hardware, with no host operating system sitting between the hypervisor and the hardware. KVM is implemented as a set of kernel modules and runs in kernel space. For that reason, it is often described as a Type 1 hypervisor. At the same time, KVM depends on the full Linux kernel for scheduling, memory management, drivers, and device support, along with everything that comes with that.

Xen is what we often refer to as a “true” Type 1 hypervisor. The Xen hypervisor boots directly on the hardware and does not depend on the Linux kernel. Linux is commonly used in a privileged control domain, known as Dom0, but it is not required for Xen itself to function.

At a high level, the architectural difference looks like this:

Xen and KVM architecture at a high level. Xen runs as a small, dedicated hypervisor directly on the hardware, with an optional control domain (Dom0). KVM operates as part of the Linux kernel and relies on the full Linux stack and user space components to manage virtual machines.

What does this mean in practice? Xen offers a very small, purpose-built hypervisor layer. In some workloads, this can translate into more predictable performance and stronger isolation, because the hypervisor is not competing with a general-purpose operating system kernel at the same layer. Xen also has fewer lines of code in the hypervisor itself, which reduces the attack surface and the amount of code that needs to be audited and maintained. There are also fewer dependencies to update when updating the hypervisor.

Another common question I heard was, “What about scheduling processes? Xen must be missing the Linux kernel scheduler.” That’s true. Xen does not rely on the Linux scheduler. Instead, Xen has its own CPU schedulers that are specifically designed for virtual machines.

At a high level, Xen distinguishes between physical CPUs (pCPUs), which are the actual cores on the machine, and virtual CPUs (vCPUs), which are presented to guest VMs. Xen can dedicate physical CPUs to specific VMs using CPU pinning, ensuring that a VM runs only on a defined set of cores. Xen can also expose vCPUs that are scheduled onto shared physical CPUs, allowing multiple VMs to share CPU resources in a controlled way.

Xen supports several scheduling algorithms depending on the use case. These include general-purpose schedulers such as Credit and Credit2, which aim to fairly share CPU time across VMs, as well as real-time schedulers like RTDS for latency-sensitive and deterministic workloads. This flexibility allows operators to choose between throughput, fairness, or predictability depending on their needs.

If we look at the embedded space, this is where Xen’s architecture really shines, though it is not limited to embedded environments. In safety-critical applications, such as automotive systems, the smaller Xen hypervisor codebase means fewer lines of code that need to be audited and certified. Members of the Xen Project are actively working toward safety certification goals. By comparison, certifying KVM together with the full Linux kernel is a much larger undertaking and may not always be worth the investment. Today, the community’s expectation is that Xen can achieve safety certification for certain automotive use cases on a timeline around 2026 or 2027. Fewer lines of code also mean faster certification cycles and simpler long-term maintenance, including security updates.

At the booth, I also had a small proof of concept running to make this more tangible. The demo showed an automotive-oriented workload running on a consumer embedded device, using Xen to isolate and manage multiple domains. While still a work in progress, it sparked a lot of good conversations about how Xen can be used in constrained environments with mixed-criticality and as a foundation for safety-critical systems.

Automotive-oriented Xen proof of concept running on a consumer embedded device at FOSDEM 2026.

Overall, Xen has a clean, built-for-purpose architecture for virtualization. The Xen hypervisor itself does not depend on the Linux kernel, and that architectural choice is what sets Xen apart from Proxmox and other KVM-based solutions. You get a purpose-built hypervisor designed from the ground up for isolation, configurability, and security, with fewer lines of code and fewer moving parts at the lowest level.

Come and see what we are working on at the Xen Project. We’re a Linux Foundation project with open governance, supported by a broad set of members and contributors from across industry and academia. Whether you are running Xen today, evaluating virtualization technologies, or exploring safety-critical and embedded use cases, we’d love to hear from you. Join the conversation, follow the project’s evolution, and help shape where Xen goes next.

OSS Japan 2025: A Breakthrough Year for Open Automotive Innovation

Cody Zuschlag — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 11:35:48 GMT

The Xen Project is back from Open Source Summit Japan and Automotive Linux Summit 2025. This year’s event felt like a true watershed moment for the automotive industry and for open source. Across talks, demos, and hallway conversations, one thing was clear: open source is now a foundational pillar for the future of software defined vehicles.

The conference halls were packed with engineers from many different organizations, all collaborating toward a shared goal: powering the next generation of vehicles in the open. For the Xen Project, this was a particularly special moment. Our membership spans the full spectrum of the industry, from silicon vendors like Arm and AMD, to automotive OEMs, to companies building large-scale server and cloud infrastructure. Our members brought bold ideas, real hardware demos, and a consistent message: open source in automotive is no longer experimental. It is becoming the default implementation.

Everywhere on the show floor, Xen was quietly doing its job behind the scenes. That same hypervisor is also trusted every day in data centers and cloud environments, which is a reminder of how versatile the Xen architecture really is. It appeared again and again as the hidden layer enabling mixed criticality workloads, cockpit virtualization, and full software defined vehicle stacks. The momentum this year was undeniable.

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Industry alignment matters
The Xen Project brings together silicon vendors like Arm and AMD, automotive OEMs, and companies building large-scale server and cloud platforms. This cross-industry collaboration is what makes Xen a strong foundation for long-lived automotive systems.

Software Defined Vehicles: an Automotive Revolution

As Dan Cauchy explained clearly in his opening keynote, and as nearly every session reinforced afterward, a fundamental shift is underway in how vehicles are designed. Historically, cars were built hardware first. The hardware defined the vehicle, and software was written specifically to fit that hardware.

Dan Cauchy opening OSS Japan 2025, setting the stage for software-defined vehicles and open automotive collaboration.

That model is now being inverted. Software is becoming the defining element of the vehicle experience, while hardware is increasingly abstracted beneath it. This is a familiar pattern. We have already lived through the same transformation in the mobile phone industry, where features are now driven by operating system versions rather than by individual hardware models.

The automotive industry is following the same path. Software stacks are no longer tightly bound to a single model or trim level. Updates are no longer rare events tied to maintenance cycles. Instead, manufacturers are moving toward unified software platforms that span multiple vehicles, generations, and hardware configurations.

In the near future, a manufacturer’s software stack will run across a wide range of models and SoCs. The software will define the experience, while hardware diversity is handled through abstraction layers. Throughout the summit, we saw concrete progress toward this vision.

Renesas showcased the powerful SoCs needed to support mixed criticality workloads. Honda brought these pieces together by showing how open source software stacks can be deployed in real vehicles. Along the way, complementary work from companies like Panasonic on VirtIO and cockpit abstraction illustrated how shared standards enable this ecosystem to scale.

Honda and Renesas: Leading the Charge Toward Open SDVs

Two Xen Project board members stood out from the very beginning of the event: Honda and Renesas. Alongside them, other major automotive players, including Ford, are members of the Xen Project, reinforcing that this work is not theoretical but already aligned with real industry adoption. Their talks, booth demos, and architectural choices showed exactly how open source can accelerate automotive innovation.

Honda: building in house software with open source at the core

Yuichi Kusakabe presenting Honda’s in-house IVI software strategy and open source journey at OSS Japan 2025.

Yuichi Kusakabe gave several compelling talks describing how Honda grew an in house IVI software team from just two people into a modern organization fully committed to open source. The story was both honest and inspiring. Honda adopted AOSP, embraced SPDX and OpenChain for compliance, built strong internal processes, and delivered production quality IVI software on open foundations.

On the show floor, Honda featured multiple demos running on Renesas hardware with Xen as the hypervisor. These systems followed the AGL reference architecture that appeared in nearly every presentation throughout the event. Seeing real cockpit consoles running on Xen was a powerful confirmation of the direction the industry is taking.

Honda demo hardware running a software-defined vehicle stack on Renesas silicon with Xen as the hypervisor at OSS Japan 2025.

Renesas: turning SDV concepts into real hardware

Renesas delivered one of the strongest technical showings at OSSJ. Their sessions highlighted a unified development environment that bridges Linux, Zephyr, Yocto, and Xen on next generation R-Car SoCs. At their booths, engineers could see real hardware running real mixed criticality workloads side by side, all orchestrated by Xen.

Harunobu Kurokawa presenting Renesas’s open source SDV platform and reference hardware at OSS Japan 2025.

Renesas also presented a heterogeneous compute platform combining Cortex A76 application cores, Cortex R52 real time cores, and an onboard AI accelerator. This reflects where automotive systems are headed. Workloads are increasingly diverse. Real time constraints coexist with high level applications and AI inference. Xen provides the isolation and flexibility needed to bring these elements together on a single SoC.

What stood out most was the confidence Renesas showed in demonstrating Xen on safety oriented hardware. Vendors do not make these demonstrations lightly. Renesas is now publicly working toward safety certification for Xen, aligning with the safety milestones discussed in my talk. One year after AMD achieved safety concept approval, Renesas has clearly joined the same path forward.

Panasonic: advancing VirtIO and cockpit decoupling

Panasonic delivered several strong engineering sessions that complemented the broader SDV story at the conference. Their updates from the SDV Expert Group and their work on VirtIO testing highlighted steady progress toward better virtualization quality and interoperability.

Jerry Zhao presenting Panasonic’s work on VirtIO as part of the AGL Software Defined Vehicle architecture at OSS Japan 2025.

The Unified HMI v2.0 presentation was a good illustration of where cockpit architectures are heading. By decoupling displays from the applications that render them, and by supporting multiple writers and multiple screens across AGL and Android, Panasonic showed how virtualization can simplify complex UI pipelines.

While Panasonic is not currently a Xen Project member, their work clearly contributes to the wider ecosystem that many of our members are building upon. These efforts reinforce the importance of open interfaces and shared standards in modern automotive stacks, and they align naturally with Xen-based SDV architectures.

A Shared Architecture Emerges: AGL SoDeV Takes Center Stage

One of Xen’s unique strengths is that the same core hypervisor technology is used across embedded, automotive, and server environments. Members such as Citrix (XenServer) and Vates build Xen-based solutions for large-scale server and cloud deployments, while automotive members apply Xen to safety critical and embedded systems. This shared foundation allows improvements in security, performance, and tooling to benefit all deployment models.

At the heart of nearly every SDV discussion was the same core stack: AGL on top of Linux, Xen providing isolation and virtualization, and Zephyr acting as the real time operating system for safety and control oriented workloads. This combination appeared consistently across talks, demos, and reference diagrams.

One theme appeared again and again throughout the summit. Nearly every presentation included the same AGL Software Defined Vehicle architecture diagram. At its core were VirtIO, Yocto, Zephyr, and Xen as the hypervisor.

Walt Miner presenting the AGL Software Defined Vehicle reference architecture at OSS Japan 2025.

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A clear pattern emerged at OSSJ
Across vendors and presentations, the same SDV stack kept appearing: AGL, Xen, Zephyr, VirtIO, and Yocto. This level of alignment is a strong sign that the industry is converging on shared, open foundations.

This level of alignment across vendors is a strong sign of maturity. When engineers agree on foundational building blocks, innovation accelerates. For SDVs, mixed criticality workloads are unavoidable. Infotainment, telematics, OTA services, sensor processing, and safety functions must coexist on the same SoC. This demands strong isolation and predictable performance, both of which Xen provides. Alongside Xen, Zephyr has clearly emerged as the go to real time operating system within this architecture, with a roadmap toward safety certification and growing adoption across automotive platforms.

Some OEMs, including Toyota, still rely heavily on QNX today. I had several thoughtful conversations with Toyota engineers who were curious about open alternatives. When organizations look for openness, strong performance, and a roadmap they can influence, Xen becomes increasingly attractive. While some benchmark data remains private, it is clear that modern open source hypervisors can match or exceed proprietary solutions in critical areas.

My Talk: Dom0less Xen for Deterministic Automotive Systems

An important part of this discussion is how Xen and Zephyr work together in practice.

I was glad to share how Xen can be configured in dom0less mode for embedded automotive use cases. The audience was highly engaged, particularly around deterministic startup behavior and the benefits of a smaller trusted computing base.

📽️

If you’d like to dive deeper, the slides from this talk are available here: Dom0less and Deterministic: Building Safer Automotive Systems with Xen (PDF)

A recording of this session, along with other OSS Japan talks, will be added once they are published.

The presentation covered how Xen can run in dom0less mode, and how Zephyr fits naturally into this model as a lightweight, deterministic operating system:

Predictable, parallel domain boot
Bounded interrupt latency
Clear isolation for safety critical systems
A Raspberry Pi 5 proof of concept running Zephyr and Linux in multiple domains
Early and natural alignment with the AGL SDV architecture

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Xen and Zephyr are better together
Xen provides strong isolation and determinism, while Zephyr delivers a lightweight, real-time OS with a clear path toward safety certification. Together, they form a practical foundation for mixed-criticality automotive systems.

These concepts illustrated how dom0less Xen supports reproducible, deterministic system behavior that maps well to automotive safety requirements. Zephyr makes an excellent fit for a very lightweight dom0 when needed, or for tightly scoped system domains that handle specific responsibilities during normal vehicle operation, such as diagnostics, monitoring, or controlled domain creation. After the session, several engineers reached out to discuss using dom0less Xen for cockpit systems, ECUs, robotics platforms, and industrial controllers. The level of interest was higher than I expected.

Xen 4.21: Modernization and Security for the Next Generation

These architectural advances are supported by strong upstream progress in Xen itself.

We also celebrated the release of Xen 4.21 in November 2025. This release represents a major step forward in modernization and security hardening.

Key improvements include:

Arm security hardening and improved determinism
More predictable interrupt latency
Memory management refinements
Broader CI coverage on Arm and x86
Continued modernization of the codebase
Early support for RISC V

These improvements strengthen Xen for real time and safety aligned workloads. As SDVs scale across architectures, having a hypervisor that works naturally on Arm, x86, and emerging RISC V platforms is a significant advantage. This flexibility is essential for OEMs building long lived platforms that must evolve over many years.

Outside the Open Source Summit Japan 2025 venue in Tokyo.

Safety Certification: a Community Driven Path Forward

Safety is the next major frontier for open hypervisors, and Xen is making steady progress.

AMD achieved safety concept approval in 2024
Renesas is actively working toward safety certification in 2025
The Xen Project is building a community driven pilot for Safety Certification Ready

This work includes open safety artifacts, clear documentation, public CI, and reproducible system behavior. Zephyr follows a similar path, making the Xen and Zephyr combination particularly compelling for safety oriented SDV designs. As companies see a visible and transparent path toward certification, the case for using open source in safety critical environments becomes much stronger.

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Safety work is already underway
With AMD achieving safety concept approval and Renesas publicly working toward certification, the Xen community is building a transparent, collaborative path toward safety-ready open systems.

Why Automotive Companies Are Turning to Xen

This shift toward SDVs also enables another critical capability: over the air updates.

By the end of the week, the message was clear:

Xen is already part of the AGL reference architecture
Major vendors deploy Xen on real automotive hardware
Performance is competitive with proprietary hypervisors
Xen offers transparency, flexibility, and no licensing fees
Companies can directly influence the roadmap through contributions
The safety story continues to strengthen

This combination of openness, performance, and industry alignment is exactly what engineers and decision makers are looking for. SDV architectures built on Xen, Zephyr, and AGL make it possible to deliver frequent OTA updates that improve functionality, fix issues, and strengthen security over the lifetime of a vehicle. This is a dramatic change from the once per year, or less, update cycles that drivers are used to today.

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From yearly updates to continuous improvement
Software-defined vehicles make frequent OTA updates possible. This unlocks new features, improves security, and extends vehicle lifetimes far beyond the traditional once-per-year update cycle.

Harunobu Kurokawa (Renesas) and Cody Zuschlag (Xen Project) at OSS Japan 2025.

Closing Thoughts and an Invitation

It would also be incomplete not to acknowledge the work of EPAM, another Xen Project member. While not physically present at the conference, EPAM’s engineering contributions were very much visible behind the scenes.

I left OSS Japan feeling proud of the Xen community and grateful for the leadership shown by Honda, Renesas, Panasonic, and many others shaping the future of automotive software. The demos were impressive, the hallway conversations were energizing, and the collaboration across projects felt stronger than ever. My own Raspberry Pi demo was built directly on EPAM’s ongoing work to create real world SDV architectures across multiple platforms, and it is a great example of how member contributions extend far beyond the show floor.

If your organization is exploring software defined vehicles, virtualization, or open automotive platforms, now is an excellent time to get involved. The Xen Project community is open, supportive, and excited to collaborate.

🤝

Join the conversation
If your organization is exploring software-defined vehicles, virtualization, or open automotive platforms, the Xen Project community is open, collaborative, and ready to work together.

Feel free to reach out, and stay tuned as our safety work continues to move forward.

🛠️ Engineering Trust: How Xen’s Open CI Powers Global, Hardware-Level Testing

Cody Zuschlag — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 14:11:20 GMT

In safety-critical industries like automotive and industrial systems, trust is non-negotiable. When building software that controls critical hardware, like braking systems or factory automation, you need confidence. The software must behave exactly as intended. Every time. On the actual device.

That's why the Xen Project is investing in a new kind of continuous integration (CI). A CI that is open, transparent, and global.

🧠

The Xen Project is hosted by the Linux Foundation, ensuring the project remains open, protected, and community-governed.

This lets adopters of one of the world’s most secure and stable open-source hypervisors, Xen, have confidence in the software that controls their hardware. Xen is laying the foundation for the next generation of automotive and industrial systems. Systems that demand high core counts per watt and per square centimeter.

🚀 A CI Pipeline That Meets You Where You Are

Most open source CI pipelines run on generic cloud VMs. These are great for catching bugs and enforcing code quality. But they rarely replicate real-world hardware conditions.

That doesn’t cut it when you're working with diverse hardware architectures or building for mission-critical deployments.

✅

Xen’s CI is different.

It supports real bare-metal testing across a globally distributed fleet of devices.

Contributors can see, in real time, how their changes perform on:

Arm boards
x86 servers
Embedded platforms
...and more

And this is only the beginning.

🔧 Bring Your Own Hardware

Partners can contribute their own on-site test hardware, like embedded boards, laptops, and servers, to the CI network. All by following some straightforward setup guidelines. This allows consumers and integrators to run the Xen test jobs and confirm that Xen runs correctly on their specific devices. In this way, everyone benefits form the larger Xen Project infrastructure.

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This means companies working with proprietary or pre-release silicon can test changes securely, behind their own firewall, while still benefiting from community collaboration.

With modern System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designs, development cycles require fast validation across the full software stack, hypervisor included.

🚗 Why This Matters for Automotive and Embedded Innovators

Companies like Honda, Ford, Renesas, Arm, and AMD are already on the Xen Project Advisory Board. They know that long-term success in embedded systems depends on more than just good code. It requires a transparent, reproducible, and community-driven process.

Xen’s CI delivers:

✅ Hardware Assurance: Real testing on real devices, not just emulated environments.
🌍 Customization Without Isolation: Add test devices on-site, without giving up collaboration.
🧾 Traceability: Every test is logged, traceable, and publicly viewable.
📊 Global Visibility: A live CI status page shows what’s running, where, and how it’s performing.
⏱️ Faster than the Lab: Say goodbye to the cost and delay of external test labs. CI results happen in minutes, not days.

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Learn more on our CI overview page

🤝 A Model for Open Collaboration

This isn’t just a CI. It's a model for how open source communities and industry can work together.

By opening our infrastructure and inviting partners to participate directly in validation, we’re proving that shared tooling can meet enterprise requirements. All without compromising security or intellectual property.

We believe this approach is the future of safety-critical open source.

🧭 Join the Mission

Are you working on hardware that could benefit from secure, stable, and scalable virtualization?

🎯

Join us as a voting member of the Xen Project Advisory Board. Help shape the direction of Xen and power the next wave of innovation in embedded systems.

We’re building something different.
Something open.
Something real.

Learn more about the Xen CI

🛠️ Xen Summit 2025: Find Your Place in the Future of Virtualization

Cody Zuschlag — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 13:39:53 GMT

The annual Xen Summit is right around the corner, and there has never been a more exciting time to be part of the Xen Project.

As enterprise and industrial needs shift and proprietary vendors rethink their licensing, the industry is ready for strong, open alternatives. Xen stands out not only as a reliable solution, but as a versatile, battle-tested, and community-driven hypervisor that’s ready to meet the computing needs of the future.

Whether you’re building for the cloud, the car, or the next wave of secure computing, Xen is like a Swiss army knife for virtualization: a trusted, adaptable tool powering real innovation across many industries.

🔄 One Hypervisor, So Many Uses

Xen isn’t just growing in one area. It’s powering innovation across four major domains:

🚗 Automotive and Safety-Critical Systems From software-defined vehicles to secure ECUs, Xen allows carmakers to consolidate hardware, reduce cost, and increase system isolation. It’s a natural fit for safety-first design.
🏭 Industrial and Embedded Use Cases In rugged, real-time, and space-constrained environments, Xen offers low-overhead virtualization that is efficient, stable, and scalable.
🖥️ Enterprise Servers and Cloud Data Centers Xen is built for high performance at scale. It helps multi-core systems deliver more compute per kilowatt and per square meter—critical in today’s data center environments. XCP-ng, a subproject of the Xen Project, is a drop-in replacement for that pesky and expensive proprietary virtualization platform.
🧑‍💻 End-User Virtualization and Desktop Security Xen is the foundation of security-focused systems like Qubes OS, where each app runs in its own virtual machine. It plays a key role in building compartmentalized, secure desktop environments.

These are not just ideas or future goals. They’re active, real-world use cases where Xen is already making a difference.

🗓️ What to Expect at Xen Summit

Hosted at AMD’s (formerly Xilinx) San Jose campus, Xen Summit 2025 is the premier gathering for the Xen community. It brings together project contributors, Advisory Board members, and implementers from across the ecosystem. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or a curious newcomer, this is the place to connect.

🌅 Mornings: Presentations and Announcements

Each day kicks off with a lineup of talks, demos, and lightning presentations that showcase the latest developments across the Xen ecosystem. Expect exciting updates, real-world success stories, and a clear look at where Xen is heading next.

🧠 Afternoons: Interactive Design Sessions

The afternoon sessions give the community a chance to dive into key topics through an open, collaborative format. Attendees vote on the subjects they want to explore, and the most popular ones are discussed in town hall–style sessions. Everyone is welcome to ask questions, share ideas, and help shape Xen’s future.

🤝 Backed by Industry Leaders

This year’s summit is proudly supported by sponsors including AMD, ARM, Honda, XenServer, and Vates, with more to be announced soon. Their support reflects the growing momentum behind Xen and a shared commitment to building open, secure, and high-performance virtualization together.

📣 CFP Still Open… We Want to Hear From You 🫵

Have something to share? We’d love to see your proposal.

🚨

The Call for Proposals is open until July 1. Whether you’re solving problems with Xen, building something new, or have insights to share, this is your opportunity to be part of the program.

👉 Submit your talk here

👥 A Community-Powered Future

Xen continues to grow as the world’s most secure, performant, and open hypervisor because of the people behind it. The summit is more than just an event. It’s the premier opportunity to connect, collaborate, and shape the future of virtualization together.

The Xen Project is proudly hosted by the Linux Foundation, helping ensure stable, neutral governance and a sustainable future for the project.

Whether you’re optimizing cloud workloads, securing embedded systems, or building safety-critical platforms, now is the perfect time to get involved—or get even more involved—with Xen.

🔗 Join us this September

Learn more and register: https://xenproject.org/resources/xen-summit

Let’s build the future of virtualization, together.

Let’s Grow Xen Together!

Cody Zuschlag — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 15:01:27 GMT

Hey everyone,

I’m excited to step-up to the role of Community Manager for the Xen Project! For those that I haven’t met yet, I’m Cody Zuschlag. My focus is on growing and strengthening the Xen community: expanding our contributors, welcoming new members, and ensuring a thriving, collaborative ecosystem. The Xen project has been supported by some incredible community managers in the past and while their shoes won't be easy to fill, I'm ready to take on the challenge!

Why Xen?

First, let's talk about why I love Xen. Xen is open source, security-first, and built for the future. It has powered critical infrastructure for decades, and today, its role is more important than ever:

Modern Data Centers & AI: With the rapid expansion of AI and cloud workloads, Xen provides a secure, scalable, and efficient foundation for virtualization.
Embedded Systems & Edge Computing: Xen’s strong isolation and stability make it the ideal choice for automotive, industrial IoT, and other mission-critical applications.
A Cost-Effective, Open Virtualization Solution: As proprietary virtualization platforms introduce higher costs, more restrictions, and unexpected licensing changes, organizations are looking for flexible, open solutions. Xen-based technologies provide a mature, high-performance alternative that puts businesses in control. All without vendor lock-in.

And the future? It's looking very bright... There are some incredible innovations on the way that will be powered by Xen, shaping the next generation of virtualization.

Building an Even Stronger, More Open Community

My biggest goal is to expand the contributor community. That means making sure everyone feels welcome to get involved.

Open source thrives when people with different skills and backgrounds come together. And the best part? You don’t have to be a developer to make an impact.

👐

Whether you’re contributing code, documentation, testing, security expertise, research, or community support, there’s a place for you in Xen.

What I’ll Be Focusing On

Bringing in new contributors: Lowering barriers to entry and making it easier for people to get involved.
Expanding Xen’s membership: Growing the list of organizations and individuals helping to drive the project forward. By working together to create the best foundation, everyone benefits.
Creating an open and welcoming environment: A strong community is one where people feel supported, valued, and encouraged to participate.
Supporting Xen’s development: Helping maintainers, developers, and contributors work more efficiently and effectively.
Advocating for Xen as the best virtualization technology: Because it is! Xen’s security-first design, maturity, and flexibility make it the top choice for modern virtualization.

Let’s Shape the Future of Xen Together

The Xen Project has a long history of innovation, but its best days are still ahead. Whether you’ve been involved for years or are just discovering Xen, I’d love to hear from you!

What’s working? What could be better? How can we make Xen even more accessible and impactful?

Connect with me on Matrix, send me an email at community.manager@xenproject.org, or connect on LinkedIn.

Looking forward to working with all of you!

Cody

Xen Project 4.20: A Step Forward in Open Source Virtualization

Cody Zuschlag — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 13:30:38 GMT

The Xen Project has released Xen 4.20 🎉! This release introduces a range of enhancements that further solidify its position as the premier open-source hypervisor. It delivers important security updates, improved performance, and broader hardware support. Xen has doubled down as the best choice for cloud providers, enterprise users, and embedded system developers.

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Why Xen?
With strong security, high performance, and cross-architecture support, Xen remains the go-to choice for cloud providers, enterprise users, and embedded system developers.

Read the official Xen Project 4.20 Press Release from the Linux Foundation.

Evolution of Xen 4.20: The Big Picture

Xen 4.20 is not just a routine update. Instead, it reinforces Xen's clear vision of the future of virtualization. The changes in this release can be grouped into three basic themes. Each theme underscores the Xen Project's continued growth and relevance in modern computing:

1. Security is the Foundation

Security has always been the key priority of Xen. Version 4.20 yet again demonstrates how Xen's security stance distinguishes it far above the classic and emerging alternatives. Changes include expanding MISRA C compliance, integrating fuzzing techniques, and enabling UBSAN by default. These changes strengthen Xen's ability to prevent vulnerabilities at the source.

🔐

Security First:
Xen 4.20 reinforces its proactive approach to security by integrating advanced fuzz testing, enforcing MISRA C compliance, and enabling UBSAN by default.

This is yet another example of why open source is the best approach to security-focused development. These security enhancements demonstrate the project's commitment to proactive threat mitigation. Xen remains the trusted solution for enterprise and cloud environments where isolation and reliability are crucial.

2. Performance and Optimization for Modern Workloads

Modern workloads place increasing demands on computing resources. As a result, virtualization platforms must continuously evolve to meet these needs. Xen 4.20 introduces performance optimizations in some key areas. These include guest page-table management, cache utilization, and device passthrough. Paging-Write support on Intel CPUs and AMD Zen 5 optimizations ensure Xen remains competitive with proprietary hypervisors. Improvements to Xen's hypervisor architecture balance raw performance with system robustness.

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Performance Meets Stability:
Xen 4.20 enhances both speed and robustness, making it the ideal hypervisor for everything from large-scale cloud deployments to resource-constrained embedded systems.

This magic combination makes Xen the high performance choice in every situation from cloud-scale deployments to embedded applications.

3. Expanding the Architectural Footprint

An exciting step towards the future with Xen 4.20 is its expansion to architectures beyond x86 and Arm. The release includes foundational improvements in RISC-V and PowerPC, indicating early-stage development in these architectures. It's important to note that while these architectures are not yet fully supported, this release introduces key improvements in the boot process and memory management. These improvements pave the way for broader support in future releases.

💡

A Future-Ready Hypervisor:
As industry trends shift toward alternative architectures like RISC-V and Arm, Xen is evolving to meet tomorrow’s computing demands today.

Industry trends are shifting toward alternative processor architectures, and Xen is keeping pace. Experimental ARMv8-R and added compatibility for the NXP S32G3 processor family demonstrate Xen's ambition to be a truly multi-platform hypervisor. Xen is capable of running on a wide range of hardware configurations. As computing environments continue to diversify, Xen is positioning itself as a versatile solution. While RISC-V is gaining traction as an emerging architecture, PowerPC improvements remain focused on legacy support.

Xen 4.20 Key Highlights

Building on the above categories, this release introduces multiple technical enhancements in security, performance, and architecture. Here's a short list:

Security & Code Quality Enhancements

Expanded MISRA C compliance: The integration of the ECLAIR MISRA C scanner in GitLab CI now enforces 90 rules with zero unjustified violations, strengthening Xen’s code safety.
UBSAN (Undefined Behavior Sanitizer) enabled by default in the CI for x86, Arm64, RISC-V, and PowerPC.
Two existing fuzzing harnesses integrated into OSSFuzz to proactively identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities.

Core Hypervisor Improvements

Fixes in the blkif protocol specification for non-512b sector sizes.
The domain builder in libxenguest now defers un-gzipping secondary modules to the guest kernel, optimizing memory and performance.
Enhancements to bit-operation helpers and improvements in Xen’s common/arch code split for better maintainability.

Expanded Architecture Support

x86 Enhancements

Intel Paging-Write Feature support, improving guest page-table update efficiency and reducing EPT violation overhead.
AMD Zen 5 CPU support, including mitigations for the SRSO speculative vulnerability.
UEFI firmware boot improvements, avoiding problematic GetTime() and ResetSystem() runtime methods to enhance compatibility.
Deprecated support for Xeon Phi processors and x2APIC Cluster Mode.

Arm Enhancements

Last Level Cache (LLC) coloring for better performance optimization.
Experimental Armv8-R support and support for the NXP S32G3 processor family.
FF-A improvements: Indirect message support and enhanced buffer transmission.
Xen moves closer to functional safety certification with 43 new structured requirements, using OpenFastTrace for requirement linking.

Early-Stage RISC-V and PowerPC Development

RISC-V: Initial enhancements in device tree mapping and memory management initialization.
PowerPC: Early improvements in boot allocation.

Security Fixes and Industry Support

During the 4.20 development cycle, eight Xen Security Advisories (XSAs) were published. Four fixes in the hypervisor, one fix in the toolstack, one clarification on supported use cases, and two fixes in external projects.

This release was made possible with contributions from major industry players including AWS, ARM, AMD, HONDA, EPAM, Vates, and XenServer. This collaboration demonstrates that Xen continues to evolve as the trusted solution in cloud computing, security applications, and embedded systems.

The Growth and Future of Xen

The Xen Project has come a long way since its origin in academia. It has evolved into a powerful and adaptable hypervisor used in enterprise, cloud, and embedded systems. Xen's continued focus on security, performance, and cross-architecture support demonstrates a clear reality: the project remains relevant in an ever-changing technology landscape.

Industry leaders are backing and contributing at increased levels. Use cases for Xen are expanding. Xen is on a clear trajectory toward functional safety certification. The future of Xen is brighter than ever. Now with support for emerging architectures like RISC-V and enhanced ARM integration. Xen is poised to be the best option for next-generation computing environments.

As organizations prioritize security, performance, and flexibility in virtualization, open-source solutions are becoming the standard. With its latest advancements, Xen remains the clear leader in this space. The Xen 4.20 release doubles down on Xen's commitment to innovation.

🚀 Join the Community!

Xen 4.20 is just the beginning. We invite developers, enterprises, and cloud providers to contribute, collaborate, and push open-source virtualization forward.

👉 Get Involved Here

Xen Project Winter Meetup

Kelly Choi — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 11:33:03 GMT

We just wrapped up the Xen Winter Meetup 2025. It was an amazing opportunity to push Xen forward in a way that can only happen when people get together in person. Organized by Vates, we hosted it at the University of Grenoble IMAG building, a great spot for cutting-edge research in computer science and virtualization. Our goal? Accelerate Xen’s development, bring in fresh minds, and foster stronger ties between industry and academia.

🐼 Why we did it

The idea for this meetup started at the last Xen Summit, where a design session revealed how much progress can be made when we sit down and tackle challenges head-on. Xen Summit itself is fantastic, with deep technical talks and important roadmap discussions, but we wanted to take things further. There’s something special about in-person brainstorming that no online discussion can replace.

We decided to double down on what makes the Xen community great: collaboration, innovation, and a shared passion for building a better virtualization stack. Furthermore, we found an opportunity to expand our reach. Xen needs more contributors. However, developers often don’t even realize they can get involved. By hosting this meetup, our objective was to make it easier for people—especially students and researchers—to step in, learn, and contribute.

Grenoble was the perfect location to realize our objecctives. The city is home to some top-tier research teams, like KrakOS at LIG, who specialize in virtualization, OS design, and cloud infrastructure. We knew bringing Xen developers and researchers together would spark new ideas and open doors for up-and-coming contributors. With seasoned Xen devs mentoring newer ones, we’re keeping knowledge sharing alive and ensuring the stability of the project for years to come.

The IMAG, home of the Xen Winter Meetup 2025 (Grenoble)

A fully independent Xen meetup

We also wanted to prove that a Xen-focused event could be community driven without high-cost partners while remaining accessible to all. Hosting it ourselves meant we had full control over the agenda, keeping the focus 100% on what benefits the Xen community. We didn’t need a huge budget: just amazing people with a shared commitment to making Xen better.

⏩ A packed but well-paced meetup

We ran the Xen Winter Meetup over two days, striking a balance between structured sessions and free-flowing discussions. Mornings were packed with talks, where developers and researchers shared their latest work, while afternoons were all about design sessions: getting hands-on and tackling real technical challenges together.

We were very pleased with the format. Too often conferences cram in endless back-to-back talks, leaving everyone mentally drained by the end of the day. We wanted something different, something that kept the energy high and made room for actual problem-solving. By keeping the mornings focused on presentations and reserving the afternoons for in-depth discussions, we avoided mental burnout and got the best of both worlds.

The main talks

Olivier kicked things off with a quick intro talk, covering why we organized this event and some logistics details.

From there, Kelly (Xen Community Manager) gave us a Xen Project weather report, looking at recent successes and transformations within the project. It was a great way to set the stage for what’s ahead and highlight how Xen continues to evolve.

Then we got into the meaty technical talks. Teddy (Vates) gave an insightful presentation on Rust within the Xen Project, showcasing the work being done to bring memory safety and modern tooling into the hypervisor. Andrew (Citrix) followed with an overview of key improvements and opportunities in the Xen Hypervisor, essentially laying out a roadmap for where we need to focus our efforts in the coming months and years. This talk is definitely one to keep in mind, as it’s going to serve as a reference for major Xen development moving forward.

Andrei (Vates) then took the stage to go over our progress on getting AMD SEV support into Xen, a critical piece for enhancing security and workload isolation. On Friday, Piotr (3MDeb) presented a fascinating talk on host Secure Boot for XCP-ng, showing how it can be done properly—and within a week, they already had a working proof of concept! It was really engaging to see just how thin the layers between hardware, firmware, and Xen/XCP-ng really are.

We also had some great contributions from academia. Léo (University of Rennes) gave a talk about using Xen to analyze VM memory without being detected by malware—a true cat-and-mouse game between attackers and defenders. Caleb (University of Grenoble) followed with his research on Xen’s behavior when migrating between heterogeneous CPUs. This isn’t published yet, but once it is, we’ll definitely share more details in a future post!

Back to Xen development, Thierry (Vates) provided a recap of the Q35 work and what’s next, with some valuable insights from Andrew on key architectural decisions. Finally, Julien (Clever Cloud) wrapped up the talks with a real-world use case, showing how they use XCP-ng + Xen Orchestra (Vates VMS) in their PaaS platform, and how it could help businesses migrate away from VMware.

Every talk brought something unique to the table, making it clear that Xen’s ecosystem is alive, evolving, and tackling exciting challenges head-on!

Design sessions: an essential tool for collaboration

One of the biggest strengths of this meetup was the design sessions. These weren’t just regular talks—they were interactive, hands-on discussions where we reconfigured the room, formed a big circle, grabbed a whiteboard, and got straight to problem-solving. This setup made a huge difference. Instead of just listening, everyone actively contributed to shaping Xen’s future, discussing architecture, features, and the next steps for key developments. All while leaving room to deep dive into any challenging topics.

A lot of important topics were tackled: PVH virtualization mode, nested virtualization, and the Xen IOMMU we’re bringing upstream. The second day opened up even more diverse discussions, with a dedicated session on “Getting Started with Xen’s Codebase”, making it easier for newcomers to contribute, and another on “Strengthening Collaboration Between Xen and Academia”, which led to concrete action points.

These sessions didn’t just help move technical topics forward—they helped build stronger relationships between teams from different companies and universities. And that’s the real magic of these events and the greater Xen community. When people connect and collaborate in person, the effects ripple far beyond the meetup itself. We believe the relationships built here will make upstream development smoother and more efficient, ensuring that Xen continues to evolve with input from a diverse and engaged community.

It was also about cheese and computers

A Winter Meetup in the Alps without cheese? Not happening. So, of course, we organized a proper fondue night, because what better way to wrap up intense discussions than by almost drowning in melted cheese (we survived… barely).

These social moments are just as important as the technical ones. When you step away from deep-dive discussions and just hang out, real connections start to form. And that’s what makes long-term collaboration easier. When you’re working with people across time zones and only interacting through screens, having shared memories from a night like this changes everything. It’s no longer just “someone from another company” on the other side of an email—it’s someone you’ve had a laugh with, debated with, and maybe even fought over the last piece of bread.

The Xen community is diverse and thriving. It's a place where folks from all walks of life can come together and work towards a common goal and passion. These special moments let this wide variety of folks connect and hopefully build lasting bonds. The community is welcoming and ready to accept new contributors!

At the end of the day, these meetups aren’t just about code: they’re about strengthening the Xen community as a whole, and sometimes, all it takes is a good meal to turn colleagues into actual friends.

One of four large tables, fully prepped and ready to welcome a serious cheese feast!

What about computers, and very old ones? What’s a meetup full of virtualization and OS enthusiasts without a deep dive into computing history? We couldn’t pass up the chance to take everyone to ACONIT, home to one of the most incredible computer collections in the world.

From the very first machines of the 19th century to rare and iconic hardware like mainframes, early IBM computers, analog machines, and legendary personal computers, the visit was a time-travel experience through the evolution of computing. Seeing these machines up close—some of which laid the groundwork for everything we work on today—was a humbling reminder of how far we’ve come.

And let’s be honest, for a room full of tech people, this was geek heaven. It was another highlight of the meetup, adding a unique touch that made this gathering not just about Xen, but about celebrating the whole history of computing.

🖥️

A word on ACONIT:ACONIT, the Association for a Conservatory of Information Technology, founded in 1985 with principle objective of preserving the history of computing and creating tools to better understand and explain to the general public the risks and rewards of current developments in the information processing as it permeates deeper into society. You can read moreon their website.

🎯 Our take on the meetup

First off—huge kudos to everyone who made this happen! A big thanks to all the attendees; nearly everyone who signed up showed up, despite flu season trying to mess with our numbers. Out of a max capacity of 50, we had 47 people in the room. That was seriously impressive for such a deep technical gathering in Grenoble.

This wouldn’t have been possible without the University of Grenoble generously hosting us and, of course, the amazing Vates team, who made sure everything ran smoothly so that we could focus on discussions, not logistics.

Beyond just being a great moment for the Xen community, this meetup proved something important: a Xen board member can organize a high-impact gathering at a very reasonable cost, all while accelerating real collaboration. No need for huge conference budgets—just the right people, the right topics, and a shared drive to move Xen forward.

In the end, we achieved all of our goals. We brought more people together around Xen’s future, and the mix of attendees was incredible: IaaS providers, hardware manufacturers, academic researchers, software vendors, and experts—all in the same room, actively shaping what’s next.

This wasn’t just a meetup. It was a step forward for Xen’s long-term success and we’re incredibly proud of what we built together.

Thanks for coming and we look forward to the next meetup!

Blog post content courtesy of Olivier Lambert, Vates.

Welcome Honda to the Xen Project Board

Kelly Choi — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 14:10:03 GMT

We're excited to announce our newest Advisory Board Member Honda, to Xen Project.

Since its foundation, Honda has been committed to "creating a society that is useful to people" by utilizing its technologies and ideas. Honda also focuses on environmental responsiveness and traffic safety, and continue to take on the challenge of realizing a sustainable future.

I am sure that the community will agree that this is a huge step and achievement for our open source project. Honda's investment into supporting Xen means we are expanding our efforts to create a more secure and versatile hypervisor, with real world applications. Their commitment and partnership with Xen only increase the capabilities that our virtualization technology has achieved so far.

With Honda joining, their insights will help us navigate new challenges, expand our outreach to new contributors and enhance policies surrounding our community.

Their unique perspective will be invaluable as we tackle goals for the future, and we’re thrilled to have their voice guiding our strategy and vision.

Please join us in giving a warm welcome to Honda! We’re eager to see how their leadership and technical teams will help shape the future of the Xen Project. Together, we’ll continue building a strong, inclusive, and innovative community.

Kelly,

Community Manager

Say hello to our new website

Kelly Choi — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 15:09:12 GMT

Hello Xen Community,

You may have noticed something different...

We've refreshed our existing website!

Why did we do this?

Well, all these new changes are part of an ongoing effort to increase our visibility and make it easier to find information on pages. We know how important it is for both users and wider stakeholders to learn about project, progress and ways to contribute.

Our documentation will still link to our old wiki for now, as this is where most of our guides are stored. However, you might remember we are in the process of moving to Sphinx so we will eventually update the website once we have more content created. We welcome community members to contribute to this!

Have fun exploring what's new on our website, and we hope to see you hang around our matrix channels. You'll find most of our developers and members there, and it's also a place to ask more questions.

If you do have any feedback or notice errors, please feel free to reach out.

Kelly,

Community Manager

Xen Project Announces Performance and Security Advancements with Release of 4.19

Kelly Choi — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 01:50:35 GMT

New release marks significant enhancements in performance, security, and versatility across various architectures.

SAN FRANCISCO – July 31st, 2024 – The Xen Project, an open source project under the Linux Foundation, is proud to announce the release of Xen Project 4.19. This release marks a significant milestone in enhancing performance, security, and versatility across various architectures, including Arm, PPC, RISC-V, and x86, altogether providing a robust and secure hypervisor solution for both enterprises and cloud providers.

The Xen Project continues to lead the way in virtualization technology. With contributions from a wide and diverse range of companies, including board members AMD, ARM, AWS, EPAM, Vates, and XenServer, Xen Project 4.19 introduces a range of key changes and improvements that solidify its position as a premier open-source virtualization platform. Comprehensive improvements include substantial enhancements in memory management, security, and system stability, spanning multiple architectures and benefitting a wide array of users and use cases.

“The 4.19 release is a significant achievement for the Xen community, bringing crucial enhancements across all supported architectures,” said Kelly Choi, Community Manager at the Xen Project. “New features such as the x2APIC driver for x86 and dynamic node programming for Arm highlight our focus on meeting the evolving needs of our users, and underscores our dedication to advancing virtualization technology with a robust, reliable and open source hypervisor.”

Notable Improvements in Release 4.19 Include:

Security Enhancements

Published 13 new Xen Security Advisories (XSAs) to mitigate vulnerabilities.
Adoption of additional MISRA-C rules for improved code quality.

Arm Architecture

Introduction of dynamic node programming using overlay dtbo.
FF-A notification support

x86 Architecture

Introduce a new x2APIC driver that uses Cluster Logical addressing mode for IPIs and physical addressing mode for external interrupts.
Deprecate support for XeonPhi in 4.19, with the firm plan to remove support in 4.20.

PVH

PVH dom0 has now moved to “supported with caveats” status
PVH/HVM can now map foreign pages, which should for example allow QEMU stubdomains to run as PVH
Boot time speedup due to the IOMMU changes
Don’t expose pIRQ support to HVM guests by default. The feature (XENFEAT_hvm_pirqs) can now be enabled on a per-domain basis

Other updates:

Add a new 9pfs backend running as a daemon in dom0. First user is Xenstore-stubdom now being able to support full Xenstore trace capability.
libxl support for backendtype=tap with tapback.

Increase the maximum number of CPUs Xen can be built for from 4095 to 16383.
When building with Systemd support (./configure –enable-systemd), remove

libsystemd as a build dependency. Systemd Notify support is retained, now

using a standalone library implementation.

xenalyze no longer requires `–svm-mode` when analyzing traces generated on AMD CPUs.
Code symbol annotations and MISRA compliance improvements.
CI updates:

Minimum fixes to rebuild the containers, following the HEREDOC problems.
Rebuild containers to have testing with up-to-date LTS distros.
Few build system checks, and strip the obsolete contents of the build containers.

The Xen Project 4.19 release underscores the community’s commitment to advancing virtualization technology. Visit the Xen Project website to learn more, and join the conversation by signing up for the Xen Project mailing list and Matrix.

Supporting Quotes

“AMD looks forward to embracing the advancements in the Xen 4.19 release. With MISRA C compliance nearing completion, this milestone brings us closer to a safety-certifiable hypervisor. Additionally, the support for Device Tree overlays for dynamic VM configurations significantly enhances Xen’s flexibility with AMD FPGAs and adaptive SoCs, positioning it as a robust solution for critical embedded applications.”

– Kris Chaplin, Open Source Software Lead – Systems Engineering, AMD.

“As a proud board member of the Xen Project, XenServer is thrilled to witness the release of Xen 4.19. This new release signifies a remarkable stride in code safety and memory management across various architectures. At XenServer, we are committed to our collaboration with the community to contribute to the future of the Xen hypervisor. We look forward to integrating these enhancements in security and performance into the XenServer product, ensuring that our users can leverage the latest advancements in virtualisation technology.”

– Diego Novellon, Software Engineering Manager, XenServer

“At Vates, we are pleased with the continuous advancements of the Xen project and are proud to contribute to its progress. Notably, Oleksii, one of our dedicated XCP-ng developers, served as the release manager for Xen 4.19. Currently, we are involved in the AMD SEV projects and the Xen port to RISC-V. Alongside other board members, we continue to elevate the Xen project’s visibility, ensuring it is recognized not only by its contributors but also within the virtualization sector. Beyond this release, we remain deeply committed to expanding the Xen project’s reach by building bridges with other communities and the academic world, fostering broader collaboration and innovation through teamwork.”

– Olivier Lambert, CEO, Vates

“Arm is the platform of choice for a vast ecosystem of developers, and our ongoing work with the Xen Project continues to be an important part of our commitment to the open source software community. Virtualization is critical to applications like automotive, where the XEN Hypervisor is part of the SOAFEE open source reference implementation, and the release of Xen 4.19 brings significant improvements in dynamic node programming for the Arm architecture. We look forward to seeing how developers leverage this new release for future automotive use-cases on Arm.”

– Andrew Wafaa, senior director, Software Communities at Arm

About the Xen Project

The Xen Project is the home for several virtualization-related open source projects and is licensed under the GPLv2. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, Xen Project is focused on advancing virtualization in a number of different commercial and open source applications, including server virtualization, Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS), desktop virtualization, security applications, embedded and hardware appliances, and automotive/aviation. For more information visit XenProject.org.

Media Contact:

Noah Lehman

The Linux Foundation

nlehman@linuxfoundation.org

Upcoming Closure of Xen Project Colo Facility

Kelly Choi — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 04:21:43 GMT

Dear Xen Community,

We regret to inform you that the Xen Project is currently experiencing unexpected changes due to the sudden shutdown of our colocated (colo) data center facility by Synoptek. This incident is beyond our control and will impact the continuity of OSSTest (the gating Xen Project CI loop), which we heavily rely on as a project. We understand the inconvenience this may cause to our users and stakeholders, and we are working diligently to consider different solutions as swiftly as possible.

What Happened?

We received a notification from our colo facility provider Synoptek indicating the shutdown of their services in Marlborough, where our current facility is located. As a result, the OSSTest instance hosted at this facility will likely be disrupted with an anticipated shutdown date of October 31st, 2024.

Potential Impact

The potential consequence of this shutdown may mean availability of OSSTest will be impacted, therefore affecting the number of bugs being caught. Contributors may experience quality issues with code, or face slower response times as our technical community spends more time resolving issues. We are aware of the critical nature of the services we provide and the significant impact this downtime may have.

Our Response

We are in constant communication with the colo facility provider, our IT contractors, and our Board Members to understand the scope of the problem and the estimated time for resolution. Additionally, we are exploring alternative solutions to restore our services as quickly as possible. These measures include:

Engaging with the Colo Facility Provider (Synoptek): We are working with the provider to negotiate costs and the likelihood of us moving to another facility as this was an unforeseen change.

Engaging with third parties: We have initiated discussions with our IT contractors and third-party providers to find potential alternatives, including other location facilities and donations of funds to support this move.

Options we are considering:

Move our current hardware to a different co-location.
- This could be another provider, a member of the Advisory Board, a University, or a similar organization that offers services for Open Source projects.
- This could include moving all the infrastructure, or just part of it, depending on costs and space available at the destination.
Abandon our hardware, and either re-create OSSTest from scratch at a different location or switch to a different test system (Gitlab CI).

All options have risks associated.

Further Considerations:

Moving the current hardware is expensive, even to a location provided for free. It is unknown whether our hardware will survive the move, or if we will be able to recreate the setup at the new location. Furthermore, our current IT contractors who help us manage the facility can only serve the Boston area which means we will need to factor this in when choosing a new location.

Our technical leadership team has considered abandoning our infrastructure and creating a new OSSTest instance, however, as it involves acquiring new hardware there is no guarantee we will be able to set up the new instance successfully.

An option to mitigate this risk could be to deploy on a metal-as-a-service provider, but that would require changes to OSSTest.

As a last resort, abandoning OSSTest has been discussed. The project has no replacement for a test coverage similar to what OSSTest provides. Even if Gitlab CI expanded test coverage similar to what OSSTest currently covers, some features are unlikely to be replicated: automatic bisections on regressions and testing of external projects (Linux kernel, QEMU, OVMF…).

Input from the community

While we work on identifying different options, there are a few steps you can take to stay informed.

Stay Updated: Keep an eye on our official communication channels for real-time updates and information about the status of our services.

Get involved: We appreciate you may have feedback and questions, which is why you are welcome to join the next monthly community call (Thursday 11th July 2024) to provide your input.

Assistance: We welcome members of our community to provide resources or suggest ideas that may help our project.

Looking Ahead

Our goal is to identify and implement measures that will minimize the impact on our project. We will carefully consider the feasibility of solutions, budget constraints, and the long-term needs of the Xen Project.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this unexpected announcement and appreciate your understanding and patience as we navigate this challenging situation. Your trust and continued support are invaluable to us, and we remain committed to developing a powerful and reliable open-source hypervisor.

Sincerely,

Kelly

Xen Project Community Manager

Update (12th July): The colo houses OSSTest which is a complex custom tool in Xen Project. After many years, it could be said that some machines are slightly outdated, but at the time of creation, it was very useful and has helped developers work on the code. As a community, we are now looking to shift CI and test efforts to options such as GitLab.

Xen Summit Talks Now Live on YouTube!

Kelly Choi — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 09:22:52 GMT

Hello Xen Community!

We have some thrilling news to share with you all. The highly anticipated talks from this year’s Xen Summit are now live on YouTube! Whether you attended the summit in person or couldn’t make it this time, you can now access all the insightful presentations and discussions online.

Why You Should Watch the Xen Summit Talks
The Xen Summit gathers experts, developers, and enthusiasts from around the world to discuss the latest advancements and future directions of our Project. This year’s summit featured a fantastic lineup of speakers who shared their knowledge on a wide range of topics, including:

Xen Project 2024 Weather Report, Kelly Choi – Community Manager, XenServer
Xen and the Art of Hypervisor Maintenance – Jacus de Beer, General Manager, XenServer
Unikraft Has Arrived: The Lightweight, Fast, Usable Solution for Cloud Deployments – Razvan Deaconescu & Andrei Stan, Unikraft
Next Generation Xen Architecture for Automotive – Stefano Stabellini, AMD
Open Source Safety Elements – Out of Context? – Nicole Pappler, AlektoMetis

With so many new features and updates, discover and learn something new today!

How to Access the Talks
All the talks are conveniently organized into a playlist on our YouTube channel.

We encourage you to subscribe to our channel and hit the notification bell to stay updated with the latest uploads and Xen Project news.

Join the Conversation
We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on the talks. Feel free to leave comments on the videos, join discussions on Matrix, and share your favorite talks on social media using the hashtag #XenProjectSummit.

Thank you for being a part of the Xen community. We hope you find these talks as inspiring and informative as we do.

Happy watching!

Get ready for Xen Summit 2024!

Kelly Choi — Fri, 24 May 2024 03:46:34 GMT

With less than 2 weeks to go, are you ready?

The Xen Project is gearing up for a summit full of discussions, collaboration and innovation.

If you haven’t already done so – get involved by submitting a design session topic.

Don’t worry if you can’t attend in person, we’re going to have a FREE virtual element for our attendees.

This will be hosted by the community via Jitsi and is free to join! Listen in to talks, or ask questions too.

Please subscribe to our mailing lists to find out more, or alternatively join our Matrix channels where the links will be shared.

See you there!

Kelly

Community Manager

Get involved: Xen Summit 2024 Design Sessions

Kelly Choi — Fri, 10 May 2024 06:56:17 GMT

Our design sessions are now open for Xen Summit!

If you’ve attended Xen Summit before, you might be familiar with the process.

For anyone who hasn’t done so before, please follow the instructions below, using the link to create an account.

Once you’ve created your account, you’ll be asked to verify using the code (sent on the mailing list). That’s it, you’re in!

We aim to have design sessions with a virtual element (using Jitsi/Zoom). This is free for the community to join in and listen, and will be hosted by an attendee in the session.

If you’re going to be an in-person attendee, you can propose a session and vote on sessions you would like to see discussed.

If you’re going to be a virtual attendee, you can vote on sessions you would like to see discussed. You can still propose a session, but please note there will be no professional audio or visual equipment in person for these sessions.

The final schedule will be allocated and arranged by the highest-voted sessions.

Virtual links for the community to join Xen Summit design sessions will be shared closer to the event.

For in-person tickets, click here.

Instructions:

Anyone interested can propose a topic.
All participants review the list of sessions, indicating their interest in attending each one.
The session scheduler optimizes the schedule to accommodate as many preferences as possible.
Participants can also propose long-form talks by adding [TALK] to the session title.

For suggested topics, sample Design Session submissions, and more tips check out the Xen Design Session page for more information.

See you there!

Kelly

Community Manager

Why is Open Source important? Hear from our community member.

Kelly Choi — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 08:23:12 GMT

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.

Blog - Xen Project

Xen at FOSDEM: Real-World Conversations About Xen and KVM

Further reading and links:

OSS Japan 2025: A Breakthrough Year for Open Automotive Innovation

Software Defined Vehicles: an Automotive Revolution

Honda and Renesas: Leading the Charge Toward Open SDVs

Honda: building in house software with open source at the core

Renesas: turning SDV concepts into real hardware

Panasonic: advancing VirtIO and cockpit decoupling

A Shared Architecture Emerges: AGL SoDeV Takes Center Stage

My Talk: Dom0less Xen for Deterministic Automotive Systems

Xen 4.21: Modernization and Security for the Next Generation

Safety Certification: a Community Driven Path Forward

Why Automotive Companies Are Turning to Xen

Closing Thoughts and an Invitation

🛠️ Engineering Trust: How Xen’s Open CI Powers Global, Hardware-Level Testing

🚀 A CI Pipeline That Meets You Where You Are

🔧 Bring Your Own Hardware

🚗 Why This Matters for Automotive and Embedded Innovators

🤝 A Model for Open Collaboration

🧭 Join the Mission

Learn more about the Xen CI

🛠️ Xen Summit 2025: Find Your Place in the Future of Virtualization

🔄 One Hypervisor, So Many Uses

🗓️ What to Expect at Xen Summit

🌅 Mornings: Presentations and Announcements

🧠 Afternoons: Interactive Design Sessions

🤝 Backed by Industry Leaders

📣 CFP Still Open… We Want to Hear From You 🫵

👥 A Community-Powered Future

Let’s Grow Xen Together!

Why Xen?

Building an Even Stronger, More Open Community

What I’ll Be Focusing On

Let’s Shape the Future of Xen Together

Xen Project 4.20: A Step Forward in Open Source Virtualization

Evolution of Xen 4.20: The Big Picture

1. Security is the Foundation

2. Performance and Optimization for Modern Workloads

3. Expanding the Architectural Footprint

Xen 4.20 Key Highlights

Security & Code Quality Enhancements

Core Hypervisor Improvements

Expanded Architecture Support

Security Fixes and Industry Support

The Growth and Future of Xen

🚀 Join the Community!

Xen Project Winter Meetup

🐼 Why we did it

A fully independent Xen meetup

⏩ A packed but well-paced meetup

The main talks

Design sessions: an essential tool for collaboration

It was also about cheese and computers

🎯 Our take on the meetup

Welcome Honda to the Xen Project Board

Say hello to our new website

Xen Project Announces Performance and Security Advancements with Release of 4.19

Upcoming Closure of Xen Project Colo Facility

Xen Summit Talks Now Live on YouTube!

Hello Xen Community!

Get ready for Xen Summit 2024!

With less than 2 weeks to go, are you ready?

Get involved: Xen Summit 2024 Design Sessions

Our design sessions are now open for Xen Summit!

Instructions:

Why is Open Source important? Hear from our community member.

Community is everything at The Xen Project.

Why do you think open source is important?

Why Xen?

What does contributing mean to you?

Our community is a welcoming place for all, so we encourage you to join the discussion.

Get involved today, by joining the conversation on Matrix here