Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Lars Kurth, Xen Community Manager at Citrix.
The Xen Project Developer Summit is the Xen Project’s annual developer conference. It brings together the developers and power users that define the Xen Project. We will share ideas and experiences, discuss the latest technical developments and innovations and plan the evolution of Xen and its subprojects for the coming year. Of course, the event is also about collaboration and meeting new and old community members. So if you are interested in the Xen Project, the developer summit may be for you.
This year the summit will be held in Edinburgh, Scotland, Oct. 24-25. We have fantastic line-up, which is heavy on innovation and the expansion of the Xen Hypervisor into non-traditional use-cases of virtualization. Let’s first look at some of the non-server use-cases:
In his talk called Dual Samsung on Nexus 10, Lovene Bhatia of Samsung will present the challenges of creating a dual-Android platform on the Nexus 10 using Xen on ARM. Running two copies of Android is a strong use-case to satisfy the security needs for BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), where one Android can be designated as “work” and is secure and isolated from the user’s “home” Android.
Xen in OSS based In-Vehicle Infotainment Systems by Artem Mygaiev of GlobalLogic, will show details and challenges in a sample IVI solution based on Linux, Xen and Android that addresses automotive requirements such as ultra-fast boot time. The talk will also show video clips of the work done.
In their talk called Enabling Fast, Dynamic Network Processing with ClickOS, Joao Martins of NEC will show how ClickOS, a tiny MiniOS based Xen Virtual Machine tailored for network processing can provide the high performance expected of hardware-based middlebox offerings such as firewalls, NATs, etc.
Performance Sessions
Of course, there is plenty on server virtualization and cloud for the Intel x86 architecture as well as ARM. Besides the project updates, the customary talks on improving performance, sessions to look out for are:
PVH Technical Deep Dive by George Dunlap of Citrix will explain how the new PVH guest type works, which features of PV and HVM guests are used and why. PVH guests are designed to take the best features of PV and HVM guests, and once hardened will allow the Xen Project to simplify x86 support in Xen.
Xiantao Zhang of Intel, will propose architecture modifications to the Xen Hypervisor in his talk HVM Dom0: Any unmodified OS as Dom0. These changes will allow the use of Windows, iOS and driver domains as Control Domain (Dom0) for Xen using Intel hardware-assisted virtualization technologies at comparable performance to paravirtualized Linux and NetBSD domains.
The talk “Unlimited” Event Channels by David Vrabel of Citrix will introduce a new Xen ABI and event channel design that increases the limit of Xen VMs on a host from 500 to over 100,000. and will also share performance measurements. Davids work will have a significant impact on library and cloud operating systems such as ErlangOnXen, Mirage OS and OSv.
Jaeyong Yoo of Samsung will show how ARM PVH – introduced in Xen 4.3 – will significantly reduce power consumption under Live Migration using multimedia streaming workloads as an example. Check out: Performance Evaluation of Live Migration based on Xen ARM PVH
These are just a few of the sessions in the conference program. There are plenty more on cloud computing, graphics and audio virtualization, security and many other areas. This year’s Xen Project Developer Summit shows the versatility of Xen as a hypervisor for many different applications and a step-change in innovation in the Xen ecosystem.
If you are interested in the Xen Project and have a technical background, don’t miss the opportunity to learn and network. Places for the summit are limited! So Register Now!
