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Xen Project Releases Version 4.18



Hi everyone,

It's with great pleasure that I announce our 4.18 PR release! 

Please find the PR article attached here, and information on our blog here.

I want to thank the whole community for their efforts in getting this release published.

In particular, I'd like to express gratitude to @Henry Wang for his help as the release manager, @George Dunlap for collating the downloads, and the Advisory Board for their continued support and quotes in the article. 

Some notable features:
  • Arm
    • The Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) is now merged in upstream Xen as a tech preview.
    • The Arm® Firmware Framework for Arm A-profile (FF-A) framework support is now merged in upstream Xen as a tech preview.
    • The memory subsystem in Xen on Arm64 is now more compliant with the Arm architecture.
  • x86
    • On all Intel systems, MSR_ARCH_CAPS is now visible in guests, and controllable from the VM's config file. For CPUs from 2019 onwards, this allows guest kernels to see details about hardware fixes for speculative mitigations.
    • Support for features new in 4th Gen AMD EPYC Processors:
      • CPUID_USER_DIS (CPUID Faulting) used by Xen to control PV guest's view of CPUID data
    • Support for features new in Intel Sapphire Rapids CPUs:
      • PKS (Protection Key Supervisor) available to HVM/PVH guests
      • VM-Notify used by Xen to mitigate certain micro-architectural pipeline livelocks, instead of crashing the entire server
      • Bus-lock detection, used by Xen to mitigate (by rate-limiting) the systemwide impact of a guest misusing atomic instructions
    • Support for features new in Intel Granite Rapids CPUs:
      • AVX512-FP16
    • Add Intel Hardware P-States (HWP) cpufreq driver
    • Support for enforcing system-wide operation in Data Operand Independent Timing Mode
  • RISC-V and PowerPC
    • Upstream Xen GitLab CI has been set up with full Xen build and a message printed from Xen early printk
  • Security
    • 20 XSAs has been published, enhancing the security of the project to keep it safe from common vulnerabilities
  • MISRA-C
    • The project has officially adopted more MISRA-C rules, from four directives and 24 rules in 4.17 to 6 directives and 65 rules of MISRA-C
We are doing great things in The Xen Project, and this wouldn't have been possible without the community working together. 

I look forward to seeing what we can all achieve in the future! 

Many thanks,
Kelly Choi

Come join the conversation on Matrix:
Open Source Community Manager
XenServer, Cloud Software Group

 


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