Xen Project Contributor Spotlight: Kevin Tian

The Xen Project is comprised of a diverse set of member companies and contributors that are committed to the growth and success of the Xen Project Hypervisor. The Xen Project Hypervisor is a staple technology for server and cloud vendors, and is gaining traction in the embedded, security and automotive space. This blog series highlights the companies contributing to the changes and growth being made to the Xen Project and how the Xen Project technology bolsters their business.

Name: Kevin Tian
Title: Principal Engineer of Open Source Technology Center
Company: Intel

When did you join the Xen Project and why/how is your organizations involved?
My journey with Xen Project has been ~13 years now (since 2005), with a focus on hardware-assisted virtualization using Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT). I’m acting as the maintainer for VT-x/VT-d sub-system in the Xen Project community. The Xen Project is the first open source virtualization project embracing Intel® VT and is a leading community in demonstrating new hardware virtualization features.
How does your involvement benefit your company?
Working with open source communities can definitely bring great value to the whole ecosystem around new technologies, which Intel debuts every year. For example, being the pioneer on Intel® VT, the success in the Xen Project accelerated the market transition from software-based virtualization (binary translation, para-virtualization, etc.) to hardware-assisted virtualization (HVM, PVH, etc.). Hardware-assisted virtualization helps with reduced maintenance overhead, full guest OS compatibility, and better performance.
How does the Xen Project’s technology help your business?
The ecosystem built around the Xen Project is definitely helpful in generating demand of Intel servers (with Intel® VT).
What are some of the major changes you see with virtualization and the transition to cloud native computing?
While virtualization technology has become the fundamental building block in the Cloud, there is still a major gap regarding I/O capabilities when comparing virtualized environment to bare metal. Although network and storage virtualization has been in place for years, efficient virtualization and sharing of new booming accelerators (GPU, NVMe, FPGA, QAT, etc.) are still not widely available. The ceiling of what cloud-native computing can achieve could be severely limited, if disconnected from powerful accelerators existing in the physical server.
What advice would you give someone considering joining the Xen Project?
The Xen Project is possibly one of the most successful open source virtualization projects in the world. The mature community and rich features accumulated in the decade plus the project has been in existence has provided a strong foundation to save you time either in developing a value-add business or exploiting new virtualization research.
What excites you most about the future of Xen?
I’m excited by the fact that the Xen Project keeps embracing new innovations, e.g. PVH, XenGT, etc., and penetrating new markets.