Feature Plans For Xen 4.1 Come About

Written by Michael Larabel in Virtualization on 11 April 2010 at 07:39 PM EDT. 1 Comment
VIRTUALIZATION
Xen 4.0 was just released a few days back with a variety of features from graphics card pass-through support to online resizing of guest disks, but features for Xen 4.1 are already brewing. Xen 4.1 will be the next major release for this once-popular virtualization platform and its feature list is quickly growing.

Among the proposed features so far is support for pass-through to secondary graphics cards, pulling the latest upstream QEMU code into qemu-dm that alone will provide a variety of improvements, porting the SPICE VDI project to Xen, XenFS coming to fruition, block device throttling/scheduling, improve QCOW2 support, and nesting support of VMs. As part of the secondary GPU pass-through support would be support for loading a video card BIOS from a file and pBAR->vBAR mapping.

Not all of these features may end up making the cut for Xen 4.1, but for some features (like the DomU nesting within a Dom0) there is already code in the works. There may also be other features that come about for Xen 4.1 before it's officially released at some point in the future.

The list of potential Xen 4.1 features can be found on the Xen Wiki road-map.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week