Unlike the KVM additions, the Xen hypervisor for the Linux 5.11 merge window doesn't bring any new features but just security fixes for some new vulnerabilities.

The KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) changes were sent in today for the Linux 5.11 cycle.

QEMU 5.2 was released on Tuesday as the latest feature release for this open-source processor emulator that plays an important role in the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

Red Hat engineers are working on a "big block mode" for the VirtIO-MEM code and could land for the Linux 5.11 cycle.

Intel has a shiny new feature release out of their open-source Cloud-Hypervisor that runs atop KVM and leveraging the Rust programming language.

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is seeing plenty of improvements with the Linux 5.10 kernel.

The Xen virtualization work for the Linux 5.10 kernel revolves around security.

XCP-ng as the open-source hypervisor built atop XenServer is preparing for its 8.2 LTS release while this week marked the availability of the first beta.

Virt-Manager 3.0 quietly got released a little more than one week ago.

Back in Linux 5.4 Xen 32-bit PV guest support was deprecated while now for Linux 5.9 it's set to be removed entirely. Last year's deprecation comes with the 32-bit usage dwindling in general but PVH being preferred to PV, Meltdown mitigations not being present, and the code not seeing much activity. Now for Linux 5.9 that support is being gutted.

Sent in last week for the Linux 5.9 kernel merge window were the initial batch of changes to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) while today some additional interesting changes were sent out.

QEMU 5.1 is now available for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

There are a few changes worth mentioning out of the VirtIO updates submitted today for the Linux 5.9 kernel.

Intel's Cloud Hypervisor focused on being a Rustlang-based hypervisor focused for cloud workloads is closing in on the 1.0 milestone. With this week's release of Cloud-Hypervisor 0.9 there is one very exciting feature in particular but also a lot of other interesting changes.

QEMU 5.1-rc0 is available as the first step towards this next feature release of this important component to the Linux virtualization stack.

Cloud-Hypervisor as the Intel-backed Rust-based VMM built on top of Linux's KVM now has experimental 64-bit ARM (AArch64) support.

Recently there has been an uptick in Linux upstream support activity around Loongson CPUs, the Chinese-made MIPS64 CPUs. With Linux 5.8, the newest Loongson 3 CPU models can even begin supporting KVM-based virtualization.

Sent in last week to the Linux 5.8 mainline kernel were all the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates.

While modern AMD EPYC CPUs support Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Intel more recently has been working on MKTME for similarly offering hardware-backed total memory encryption, an Intel open-source engineer has now proposed a software-based solution for protected memory support for KVM virtualization.

The all-important Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) code for open-source virtualization had mistakenly been applying its L1TF workaround for unaffected CPUs -- namely AMD EPYC CPUs -- for the past several months until the issue was uncovered this week.

Version 6.2 of the Proxmox VE open-source virtualization environment has been released for this web-based, easy-to-use solution.

QEMU 5.0 is out today for this processor emulator that is a key piece to the Linux virtualization stack.

Amazon is working on upstreaming support into the Linux kernel for AWS Entro Niclaves for additional isolation around highly sensitive data within the EC2 cloud.

Added back in Linux 5.4 was the VirtIO-FS file-system driver as a a FUSE-framework-based file-system implementation designed for guest to/from host file-system sharing for VirtIO para-virtualized devices. Now with QEMU 5.0 VirtIO-FS is supported on its side.

Both of IBM's s390 and POWER CPU architectures are seeing secure/protected guest virtual machine support with KVM on the in-development Linux 5.7 kernel.

Ahead of the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release later this month, the Canonical folks working on LXD for Linux containers and VMs have released LXD 4.0 LTS.

QEMU 5.0-rc1 was released on Tuesday as the latest development release in the path to QEMU 5.0.0 expected to be achieved later this month.

VirtIO-Video is a VirtIO-based video driver for a virtual V4L2 streaming device with input/output buffers for sharing of video devices with guests. VirtIO Video has existed for a while now but it looks like it could be getting close to upstreaming in the Linux kernel.

VMware's VMWGFX open-source Linux graphics driver stack for interfacing with their virtualization software to offer guest VM 3D acceleration that is in turn handled by the host's drivers will soon be offering OpenGL 4.x support.

With how ubiquitous the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is, one may have assumed that for years the software stack was already extensively optimized to insane levels, especially as it concerns the boot time for being able to quickly respond to changes in load... But it turns out there still is some low hanging fruit such as with Amazon's "ENA" network driver and a new patch allowing it to initialize 90 times quicker.