Monthly Archives: July 2013

The Xen Project at OSCON

This is a joint blog post by Anil Madhavapeddy and Lars Kurth

Xen Project

As in previous years, the Xen Project had a presence at OSCON again. This year, we did not have our own booth: Citrix donated some space to a number of different open source projects in their Open @ Citrix booth and the Xen Project gladly took this offer. Like in the past, we had volunteers helping out at the booth. I wanted to thank Anil Madhavapeddy, George Dunlap, Ian Campbell, Richard Mortier and Russell Pavlicek for their work.

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Xen @ Linaro Connect Europe 2013

My name is Julien Grall.  I joined the Citrix Open Source team few months ago to work on Xen on ARM with Ian Campbell and Stefano Stabellini. Since Citrix has joined the Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG), I’m also part of the virtualization team which takes care of Xen, KVM and QEMU within Linaro.

A couple of weeks ago, I have attended my first Linaro Connect Europe, held in Dublin from 8th to 12th of July.  All the major players in the ARM world came together to discuss the future of the industry and build an healthy Open Source ecosystem for ARM.

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Speakers Wanted for Xen Project User Summit

This has already been a banner year for the Xen Project.  We have already seen the 10th anniversary of the project, the birth of Xen as a Linux Foundation Collaboration Project, and the release of version 4.3 of the Xen Project software.  More than that, this is also the first year we are hosting three excellent community events:

  • the Xen Project Hackathon in Dublin, Ireland in May
  • the Xen Project User Summit in New Orleans. Louisiana, USA in September, and
  • the Xen Project Developer Summit in Edinburgh, Scotland in October.

The Hackathon was a great success in May, and the Developer Summit promises to be a terrific close to the year in October, but the User Summit is on the immediate horizon.

What is the Xen Project User Summit?

In years past, the Xen Project has hosted a number of Xen Summits.  These events were often a mixture of developer and user content, often with a majority of the sessions oriented toward developers.  This year, we have split the former Xen Summit into two distinctly different events: one for developers, and one for users.

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So, How’s Xen on Debian?

So, how many of you use Debian? I bet a lot. Well, here it is what the Debian Xen package maintainers told The Xen Project, when asked a few questions. We are talking about Bastian Blank and Guido Trotter. In fact, they share the burden, with Bastian doing “most of the work nowadays” (Guido’s words) and Guido “starting packaging Xen many years ago, while assisting with stable security updates lately” (ditto).

You’ll discover that they particularly like the Xen architecture, and this makes us really really proud. It also look like a shorter release cycle for Xen is in the wishlist. Well, Xen 4.3 cycle has already been way shorter than its predecessors, and the feeling is the future will be even better!

However, the most surprising thing is that coffee is quite unpopular with them too, as it was already the case for Maarten from Mageia… I am honestly starting to think whether this could be a ‘package maintainers’ thing’!

Anyway, sincere thanks to both Bastian and Guido for finding the time for this interview, and let’s get straight to their answers!

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Xen 4.3.0 released!

Xenproject.org is pleased to announce the release of Xen 4.3.0. The release is available from the download page:

Xen 4.3 is the work of just over 9 months of development, with 1362 changesets containing changes to over 136128 lines of code, made by 90 individuals from 27 different organizations and 25 unaffiliated individual developers.

Xen 4.3 is also the first release made with using the roadmap to track what people were doing and aim for what to try to get into this release, as well as the first release to have consistent Xen test days. This, combined with the increased number of contributors, should make this one of the best Xen releases so far. Read on for more information.

New Features

Probably the biggest single feature of this release is the experimental support for ARM virtualization, both 32-bit and 64-bit variants. The 32-bit port of Xen boots on ARMv7 Fast Models, the Cortex A15 Versatile Express platform and the Arndale board (equipped with the Exynos5 SoC by Samsung). It can boot dom0, create other virtual machines and it supports all the basic virtual machine lifecycle operations. Hardware is not yet available for 64-bit ARM processors yet, but Xen is running well in 64-bit mode on AEMv8 Real-time System Models by ARM.

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Schrödinger’s Cat in a (Xen) Virtualzed ‘Box’

Fedora Logo

Fedora Logo

Yes, apparently Schrödinger’s cat is alive, as the latest release of Fedora — Fedora 19, codename Schrödinger’s cat– as been released on July 2nd, and that even happened quite on time.

So, apparently, putting the cat “in a box” and all the stuff was way too easy, and that’s why we are bringing the challenge to the next level: do you dare putting Schrödinger’s cat “in a virtual box”?

In other words, do you dare install Fedora 19 within a Xen virtual machine? And if yes, how about doing that using Fedora 19 itself as Dom0?
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