Quite a lot has happened the last few days and I seem to be forever catching up on reporting what is going on, rather than doing this in a timely matter. As a result, this post will be a potpourri of brief updates.
Linux 3 with Xen support has been released
On July 22nd, Linus Torvald finally released the Linux 3 kernel. Although Linus said that “we have the usual two thirds driver changes, and a lot of random fixes, but the point is that 3.0 is just about renumbering … No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at all like that” this was a major milestone for Xen.org as the last missing piece for full Dom 0 support made it into the kernel. We are also starting to see concrete plans by various Linux distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and others to pick up the changes. I wanted to thank everybody who was involved in making this happen again, but in particular Jeremy Fitzhardinge and Konrad Wilk. Konrad’s talk at next week’s XenSummit will shed some light on what this means and what will happen next (also read the background story here).
Rebasing Xen ARM to xen-unstable
Jaemin Ryu started to refactor the Xen ARM code to the xen-unstable mainline and managed to get the code to build on his personal branch. The code does not run yet, but this is major progress in preparing the Xen ARM code for upstreaming into the Xen mainline. I am rather excited about the possibilities this work will create. A big thank you, and please support the Xen ARM team.
Community Leadership Summit
I spent the weekend at the CLS in Portland. You may think that this is an event for Community Managers only, but I believe that any project lead, maintainer and other person leading initiatives in open source can learn from the outcome of the CLS. Even though you were not there, it may be worth having a look at the session notes. Jono Bacon, Michael Van Riper, Eric Herberholz and the other volunteers have done a great job pulling this event together again this year. There is also a great gallery of photos by Mark T.
7 days to XenSummit
Registrations for XenSummit are going well. I am pondering whether I should close XenSummit registrations on Thusday the 28th as I will need to put the food order in on that day. I decided against it as in past years there was a rush of registrations in the last few days before the summit. What I will do instead, is estimate the food order based on past data and then limit the number of available registrations. This means that if we do get a bigger than expected surge of registrations after Thursday, there may not be space for you. If plan to attend and want to make sure that we will have space, make sure you register before Thursday!
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Xen is open, secure, and built for the future. As the new Community Manager, I’m focused on growing the Xen community, welcoming new contributors, and ensuring a thriving ecosystem. Let’s build the future of virtualization together!
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
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
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