Now available for all GNU/Linux operating systems

Oct 13, 2015 21:04 GMT  ·  By

Earlier today, October 13, the Xen Project, through Liu Wei, had the great pleasure of informing the world about the immediate availability for download of the Xen 4.6 open-source Linux hypervisor software.

According to the announcement, Xen 4.6 is a major release, not that we expected less from the leading open-source virtualization platform that is used on some of the world's top-notch cloud hosting services, including AWS (Amazon Web Services), Verizon Cloud, as well as Rackspace Public Cloud.

Prominent features of Xen 4.6 include revamped memory event subsystem, default policy implementation for Xen Security Modules (XSM), vTPM (Virtual Trusted Platform Module) 2.0 support from NSA BitDefender and Intel, grant table scalability improvements, ticket lock implementation, P2M framework, Intel Page Modification Logging Technology, Intel Cache Allocation Technology, and Intel Memory Bandwidth Monitoring.

"We continue to strive to make Xen Project Hypervisor the most secure open source hypervisor to match the security challenges in cloud computing, and for embedded and IoT use-cases," says Liu Wei. "We are also continuing to improve upon the performance and scalability for our users, and aim to continuously bring many new features to our users in a timely manor."

ARM-specific hypervisor changes

Xen 4.6 also brings various changes to the ARM-specific hypervisor, such as support for up to 128 VCPUs on ARM64 (AArch64) platforms, passthrough support for non-PCI devices, ARM GICv2 on GICv3 support, 64K page ARM guest support, Linaro's OVMF for ARM, support for 32-bit userspace in 64-bit guests, and support for the Thunder X, Renesas R-Car Gen2, Xilinx ZynqMP SoC, and Huawei hip04-d04 hardware platforms.

In addition to the great new features mentioned above, Xen 4.6 open-source hypervisor has many other interesting changes, such as the removal of the SEDF (Simple Earliest Deadline First) scheduler and Mini-OS, support for Virtual Performance Monitoring Unit, support for Intel Reserve Memory Region, as well as the implementation of Virtual NUMA for HVM guests. Download Xen 4.6 right now from Softpedia.

Update: We've been notified by Zibby Keaton from The Linux Foundation that they made a mistake to write in their press release for Xen 4.6 that the vTPM (Virtual Trusted Platform Module) 2.0 support is contributed by NSA (US National Security Agency). In fact, vTPM 2.0 support is a joint contribution between Intel and BitDefender. Therefore, we've modified the article accordingly.