Ford rolls into the Xen Project as hypervisor gears up for autos

Version 4.21 also brings advances in the datacenter, on ARM, and RISC-V

The Xen Project today delivered a major release of its hypervisor and associated tools, including contributions from automaker Ford, which quietly joined the project in June.

Ford's interest in Xen reflects the automotive industry's acknowledgment that future vehicles will all include computers to handle many tasks, among them running safety systems, instrument panels, telematics, and infotainment systems. Automakers are also keenly aware that it is untenable for safety software to stop working if an infotainment system glitches, and so are exploring in-vehicle hypervisors to isolate different workloads. Such concerns are one reason Japan's Honda is a Xen Project member.

A few months before this new Xen release – version 4.21, to be precise – 3.5 percent of authors working on the project came from Ford, more than came from Arm. Cloud Software Group was the main source of authors, ahead of AMD, SUSE, services outfit EPAM, and XCP-NG backer Vates.

Ford's efforts aren't a big part of this release, but the Xen Project is pleased with small changes that advance its plan to achieve safety certifications to make the hypervisor suitable for use in vehicles, industrial settings, and other delicate environments. Indeed, a presentation at September's Xen Summit considered readying the hypervisor for use in aviation.

While Xen drives toward automotive applications, the headline changes in this release relate to its heritage in the datacenter by adding better cache management and enhanced CPU frequency control to help run VMs more efficiently and improve performance-per-watt. A PDX compression algorithm that reduces hypervisor memory footprint and improves I/O on AMD processors is another inclusion.

Admirers of the Arm architecture get many small performance-enhancing changes. Perhaps the most notable Xen-on-Arm advance comes from Vates, which last week revealed it is getting close to delivering its fork of XenServer for Ampere's manycore Arm CPUs.

This release also advances the Xen Project's ambition to port onto the RISC-V architecture with additions said to "establish the groundwork for future RISC-V guest virtualization and hardware enablement." ®