The Xen Project descended on Toronto, Canada in late August for its annual Xen Project Developer Summit. The Summit is an opportunity for developers and software engineers to collaborate and discuss the latest advancements of the Xen Project software. It also gives developers a chance to better understand new trends and deployments in the community and from power enterprise users.
From community growth to new emerging use cases, the Summit covered a lot of ground. Developments within core technologies such as security, graphics support and hardware support were discussed. We also covered emerging technologies such as automotive, embedded and IoT. All sessions were recorded and are available here and also on slideshare (follow this link for summit presentations).
Below is a summary of a few videos that feature technology that has been recently introduced into the Xen Project hypervisor as well as emerging technologies that are being built with Xen Project technology.
New Feature Technologies from Xen Project Community and Power Users
In Xen Project 4.7, we introduced Live Patching as a technology preview. Live Patching gives system administrators and DevOps practitioners the ability to update the Xen Project hypervisor without the need for a reboot. Konrad Wilk, software development manager of Oracle and Ross Lagerwall, software enggineer at Citrix, provide insight into how it works, what the difficulties were to implement, and how it compares to other technologies for patching (kGraft, kPatch, kSplice, Linux hot-patching).
Dimitri Stilliadis, CEO of Aporeto, provides a great overview of the benefits of using Xen Project software to provide an execution environment for Docker apps. This approach allows VM-like isolations for security measures without having to sacrifice performance. The presentation introduces a new paravirtualized protocol to virtualise IP sockets and provides the design and implementation details.
Data breaches are happening all the time, and there are many ways that organisations are trying to stop this through detection, pattern matching and behavioural analysis. However, Neil Sikka, founder and CEO of A1LOGIC, provides a new way of looking at this problem and solving this problem by using the Xen Project hypervisor to enforce data loss prevention. It doesn’t use any type of detection, heuristics, pattern matching or behavioural analysis, but rather a strictly algorithmic approach rooted in hardware.
Embedded Projects and Xen Project Software
Members from the Xen Project sister community OpenXT, an open-source development toolkit for hardware-assisted security research and appliance integration, were present to provide some insights into how Xen Project is working within the embedded space and best practices for embedding Xen Project on mobile and tablet devices.
If this is an area that you are interested in, check out Christopher Clark (consultant and interoperability architect at BAE Systems) overview of the OpenXT Project, which has begun to attract new users and contributors. We also recommend Chris Patterson’s and Kyle Temkin’s step-by-step guide on the challenges and lessons to get Xen Project software started on phones and tablets. Chris is a advising computer engineer for AIS and Kyle is researcher for AIS.
Emerging Technologies
Xen Project is consistently becoming more common within automotive and aviation. Xen Project 4.7 introduced the ability to remove core Xen Hypervisor features at compile time via KCONFIG. This allows a more lightweight hypervisor, which is perfect for IoT scenarios and better for security-first environments, like automotive.
Sangyun Lee, senior embedded software engineer of LG Electronics, presents on the real-time GPU scheduling of XenGT in Automotive Embedded systems. It introduces the real-time GPU schedule of XenGT running on automotive embedded systems and explains why this should be used for an automotive system.
Xen Project is consistently being used within embedded systems for automotive. Earlier this year at CES, GlobalLogic showcased its technology behind Nautilus, which is the company’s virtualisation solution that enables multiple domains to share the GPU hardware with no more than a 5 percent overall in performance changes. More on this technology and how it uses Xen Project here.
The summit was a huge success with many interesting conversations. The Xen Project thanks everyone who attended and presented as well as the sponsors of the event Citrix, Huawei and Intel.