On its corporate blog Barry Flanagan, Xen Technology Evangelist at Citrix, provides some interesting informations emerged during the last Xen Summit. One of them is the roadmap defined for the open source hypervisor, Xen, which is the key component of virtualization plaforms from Virtual Iron, Novell, Red Hat, Sun and obviously Citrix:
Server
- Performance and scalability optimizations
- Enable Smart IO devices
- SCSI pass-through
Security
- Domain0 disaggregation; XSM Xen Security Modules
- Secure boot, TPM, certification, multi-level secure systems
Client
- Power management
- Suspend and hibernate; Clock management
- 3D video direct h/w access; high-performance guest virtualization
- USB device pass-through
Another key information lays in the project statement, re-iterated now that XenSource has been acquired by Citrix:
- Build the industry standard open source hypervisor core engine that is incorporated into multiple vendors’ products
- Be first to exploit new hardware acceleration features
- Help OS vendors paravirtualize their OSes
- Security must now be paramount
- Support multiple CPU types; big and small systems from server to client to mobile
- Foster innovation to be a great platform for research and experimentation
- Drive interoperability between Xen-based products and other virtualization products
During the entire 2007 several indication from multiple vendors (including VMware) partially revealed the intention to port hypervisors on mobile architectures, so 2008 may be the year for first attempts in this direction.