Xen Project 4.20 Feature List

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Notable Features

This release has seen the increase in hardware support for both x86 and Arm, together with the addition of other improvements and features:

  • ARM: Support for LLC (Last Level Cache) coloring.
  • ARM: Experimental support for Armv8-R.
  • ARM: Support for NXP S32G3 Processors Family and NXP LINFlexD UART driver.
  • ARM: Basic handling for SCMI requests over SMC using Shared Memory, by allowing forwarding the calls to EL3 FW if coming from hwdom.
  • x86: Support for Intel EPT Paging-Write Feature.
  • x86: AMD Zen 5 CPU support, including for new hardware mitigations for the SRSO speculative vulnerability.
  • x86: Removed support for running on Xeon Phi processors.
  • x86: xl suspend/resume subcommands.
  • x86: `wallclock` command line option to select time source.
  • x86: Switched the xAPIC flat driver to use physical destination mode for external interrupts instead of logical destination mode.
  • x86: Removed the `ucode=allow-same` command line option.
  • x86: Removed x2APIC Cluster Mode for external interrupts. x2APIC Physical and Mixed Modes are still available.
  • The dombuilder in libxenguest no longer un-gzips secondary modules, instead leaving this to the guest kernel to do in guest context.
  • Reduce xenstore library dependencies.

Ongoing activities

The Xen community has several interesting initiatives, where work is ongoing and is expected to bear fruit in forthcoming releases. Some of the highlights:

  • MISRA compliance improvements.

ARM

On Arm, PCI-passthrough work is ongoing, including some refactoring and improvements of the existing code. The work will be included in the next few releases.

RISC-V

On RISC-V, setup memory management and basic device tree mapping and parsing was introduced. In the next few releases full Xen build, AIA driver for hypervisor to support UART interrupts.