Xen.org, the community which develops the Xen hypervisor under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2) has released version 4.1, this version is the follow-up of version 4.0 which was released in April last year.
Xen is a virtualization engine, used by several Linux distributions, NetBSD and Solaris but also serves as a basis for the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) and Xen Hypervisor for Client Devices (XCI) for example, which will probably include a new version of Xen in a future release. Also Citrix XenServer which derives from XCP and Citrix XenClient which derives from XCI use Xen.
Version 4.1 adds the following new features:
- A re-architected XL toolstack that is based on the libxenlight library and provides functionally nearly equivalent to XM domain configuration files/XEND
- Prototype credit2 scheduler designed for latency-sensitive workloads and very large systems, although the scheduler is functional and stable, its algorithm need further fine-tuning before it will become Xen’s main scheduler
- CPU Pools for advanced partitioning, each CPU pool runs its own scheduler (credit 1 or credit 2)
- Support for large systems (>255 processors and 1GB/2MB super page support)
- Support for x86 Advanced Vector eXtension (AVX)
- New Memory Access API enabling integration of 3rd party security solutions into Xen virtualized environments
- Better stability through new automated regression tests
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