Xen Project Developer Summit

The creation of the Linux Foundation Labs Xen Project has been a big step forward for the Xen hypervisor community. But the Xen hypervisor isn't the only project that's been accepted into the Linux Foundation: The Xapi Project is the umbrella project for the open development of the
Xapi Toolstack, the set of software that powers XenServer and XCP. In this talk a status update for the project will be given, discussing therelationship between the Xapi project and the newly forming XenServer development community and the convergence of XCP and XenServer. The use of libraries and technology co-developed with the Mirage project will be highlighted.

Mirage is a unikernel that allows us to build applications which can be compiled to very diverse environments: the same code can be linked to run as a regular Unix app, relinked to run as a FreeBSD kernel module, and also linked into a self-contained kernel which can run on the Xen hypervisor.

Since the talk last year, we have developed around 40 new libraries that implement significant stub domain functionality; vchan, blkfront/netfront that compile in UNIX *and* Xen with similar interfaces, a message switch
that coordinates fault-tolerant communication, and an interactive fbdev. In a nutshell, it makes moving to stub domains practical where previously it was for single VM appliances. As part of this effort, we have also identified several possible improvements in hypervisor interfaces.

We would also like to announce the first 1.0 public release here!