Features Coming This Winter With Xen 4.5

The first release candidate for the forthcoming Xen 4.5 is imminent ahead of the project's plans to do the stable release in December. For those not keeping up to speed with Xen development, here's a brief look at some of the changes expected for Xen 4.5.

Some highlights for Xen 4.5 include:

- SMAP support; the Supervisor Mode Access Prevention (SMAP) feature in new Intel CPUs to offer better security.

- A rewrite of Xen's High Precision Event Timer (HPET).

- Xen PVH support for Dom0. PVH was introduced with Xen 4.4 as having PVH guest support while Xen 4.5 further stabilizes the PVH mode and allows PVH Dom0 support. The PVH Dom0 support works with Linux platforms.

- AMD microcode clean-ups.

- Support for AMD's data breakpoint extension.

- Support for feature masking the CPU's model specific registers (MSRs).

- Support for the Broadcom TruManage technology.

- NUMA memory scrubbing support.

- IOMMU support for ARM.

- Many other Xen on ARM improvements.

Those wishing to learn more about the in-development Xen 4.5 can find extra details via the Xen Project Wiki. There's also this Xen 4.5 roadmap presentation by Oracle's Konrad Wilk.