It also introduces Intel and x86 feature support

Dec 8, 2016 01:00 GMT  ·  By

On December 7, 2016, the Linux Foundation-hosted Xen Project proudly announced the release of Xen 4.8 hypervisor, the powerful open source industry standard for virtualization.

It's been a little over five months since the release of the Xen 4.7 series, and it looks like the development team behind this highly customizable, extensible and flexible type-1 or baremetal hypervisor did not stop improving the software and adding new features to it. Xen 4.8 is the latest stable and most advanced version, which focuses on advanced embedded use cases and enhances support for ARMv8-A based servers.

"New functionality added to the Xen Project for market segments like automotive, aviation, embedded and security have turned out to be valuable building blocks for traditional server virtualization and hyperscale clouds," said Lars Kurth, chairperson of the Xen Project. "Some of the innovations contributed by vendors from these segments have helped increase performance, scalability and reduced latency for general workloads."

Here's what's new in Xen 4.8

Prominent new features of the Xen 4.8 hypervisor include initial support for ARM server Live Patching, which, as expected, lets users apply security fixes without rebooting, support for the GICv2m interrupt controller with MSI capabilities, as well as mmio-sram and IO memory regions that contain special caching requirements. Production-ready support for the scalable Credit2 scheduler is also present in Xen 4.8.

There's also support for the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC, the ability to build ARM64 guests with ACPI support, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for ARM Development Preview, support for Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel AVX-512), PVCLOCK_TSC_STABLE_BIT support, and stabilization improvements to the PVH v2 guest. You can download the Xen 4.8 source archive right now from our website.