Xen Project Release Strengthens Security and Pushes New Use Cases

Xen Project technology supports more than 10 million users and is a staple in some of the largest clouds in production today, including Amazon Web Service, Tencent, and Alibaba’s Aliyun. Recently, the project announced the arrival of Xen Project Hypervisor 4.7. This new release focuses on improving code quality, security hardening and features, and support for the latest hardware. It is also the first release of the project’s fixed-term June – December release cycles. The fixed-term release cycles provide more predictability making it easier for consumers of Xen to plan ahead.  

We recently sat down with the Xen Project chairperson, Lars Kurth, to talk about some of the key features of the release and the future of Xen Project technology. Lars will be discussing this topic and more during Xen Project’s Developer Summit in Toronto, CA from August 25-26 — the conference is directly after LinuxCon North America.

Q: What was the focus on this release?

Lars Kurth: There were five areas that we focused on for this release (full details are in our blog). In summary, we focused on security features, migration support, performance and workloads, support for new hardware features, and drivers and devices (Linux, FreeBSD and other).

Security is consistently something that we focus on in all of our releases. There are a lot of people that rely on Xen Project technology and security is our top concern in any release as well as how we organize our process around security disclosures.

Q: What was the biggest feature coming out of this release?

Lars: The biggest feature for us is live patching, which is a technology that enables re-boot free deployment for security patches to minimize disruption and downtime during security upgrades for cloud admins. It essentially eliminates all cloud reboots, making cloud providers and their users much more safe. It also eliminates a lot of headaches for system and DevOps admins of the world.

Q: Xen is often associated with the cloud, but are there additional use cases that you see growing around this technology, if so why?

Lars: We are seeing a lot of growth in terms of contributions, as well as many different use cases emerging, including automotive, aviation, embedded scenarios, security, and also IoT. In addition, we continue to grow within the public cloud sector and traditional server virtualization.

On the security front, for example, a number of vendors such as A1Logic, Bitdefender, Star Lab and Zentific have released or are working on new Xen Project-based security solutions. In addition, the security focused and Xen-based OpenXT project has started to work more closely with the Xen Project community.

Long-time contributors to the Xen Project, such as DornerWorks – a premier provider of electronic engineering services for the aerospace, medical, automotive, and industrial markets – have expanded their scope and are now providing support for the Xen Xilinx Zynq Distribution targeting embedded use-cases. We have also seen an increasing number of POCs and demos of automotive solutions, which include Xen as a virtualization solution.

Growth in these sectors is largely due to the Xen Project’s flexibility, extensibility, customisability and a clear lead when it comes to security-related technologies. Over the last year, we have also seen contributions increase from developers with strong security and embedded backgrounds. In fact, this totaled nearly 17 percent of the overall contributions in this release cycle, up from 9 percent in the previous release.

Q: How did you address these uses cases in this latest release?

Lars: We introduced the ability to remove core Xen Project Hypervisor features at compile via KCONFIG. This creates a more lightweight hypervisor and eliminates extra attack surfaces that are beneficial in security-first environments and microservice architectures. Users will still be able to get the core hypervisor functions, but they won’t receive all the drivers, schedulers, components or features that might not fit their use case.

Essentially it gives people an “a la carte” feature set. They can decide what they need for compliance, safety or performance reasons.

Q: Were there any new contributors for this release that surprised you?

Lars: We had three new companies contributing to the project: Star Lab, Bosch and Netflix. I met engineers from Star Lab for the first time at the 2015 Developer Summit less than a year ago, and helped introduce them to the Project’s culture. In that short period of time, Doug Goldstein from Star Lab has moved into the top five contributors and top 10 code reviewers for the Project.

I was surprised about Netflix’s contributions; I didn’t even know the company used Xen. Netflix improved and secured the VPMU feature, which is incredibly useful for system tuning and performance monitoring. Bosch Car Multimedia GmbH added some new ARM functionality. In addition, we have seen quite a bit of Xen related development in upstream and downstream projects such as Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, QEMU and Libvirt.  

Q: What’s next for Xen Project? Where do you think the technology is heading in the future and why?

Lars: In the last three releases, we introduced several major new features such as PVH, COLO, new schedulers, VMI, Live Patching, Graphics Virtualization, etc. and significant re-work of existing features such as Migration and the Xen Security Modules (XSM). Looking at trends within the community, I expect that stepwise evolution of large new features to continue.

Some new capabilities, such as restartable Dom0’s, and additional techniques to provide more isolation and security, are also likely to appear. In addition, it looks likely that we will see some GPU virtualization capabilities for GPUs that target the ARM ecosystem, although it is not yet clear whether these will be available as open source. I also expect that both Intel and ARM hardware features will be closely tracked.

Some areas, such as new schedulers, XSM, PVH and Live Patching, will see significant efforts to harden and improve existing functionality. The goal is to ensure their swift adoption in commercial products and Linux and BSD distributions. Some features, which are not enabled by default are likely to become part of the Xen Project Hypervisor’s default configuration.