Xen reached the minor release 3.0.3 as planned in September, after being delayed from initial release date in July.
New features included are:
- a new easy-to-use CPU scheduler which includes weights, caps, and automatic SMP load-balancing
- support for Xen-oprofile to allow measurement and optimization of code paths
- greatly enhanced support for unmodified (“hvm”) guests including Windows and legacy Linux operating systems
- support for dynamic-allocation and copy-on-write disks
- packet segmentation offload in guests to improve network performance
- enhanced support for IA64 (IPF) systems and initial support for Power
Packages for Red Hat and Novell distros are available here.
A demo liveCD has been released accordingly and The Coding Studio published a screenshot walkthrough of it:
After this release both XenSource and Virtual Iron are expected to launch new betas of their products, introducing support for Windows virtual machines on AMD SVM or Intel VT CPUs.