Hi everyone,
It's with great pleasure that I announce our 4.18 PR release!
*Please find the PR article attached here
<https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231120045533/en/Xen-Project-Releases-Version-4.18-with-New-Security-Performance-and-Architecture-Enhancements-for-AIML-Applications>,
and information on our blog here
<https://xenproject.org/2023/11/20/xen-project-releases-version-4-18-with-new-security-performance-and-architecture-enhancements-for-ai-ml-applications/>.*
I want to thank the whole community for their efforts in getting this
release published.
In particular, I'd like to express gratitude to @Henry Wang
<Henry.Wang@arm.com> for his help as the release manager, @George Dunlap
<george.dunlap@cloud.com> for collating the downloads, and the Advisory
Board for their continued support and quotes in the article.
*Some notable features:*
- *Arm*
- *The Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) is now merged in upstream Xen
as a tech preview.*
- *The Arm® Firmware Framework for Arm A-profile (FF-A) framework
support is now merged in upstream Xen as a tech preview.*
- *The memory subsystem in Xen on Arm64 is now more compliant with
the Arm architecture.*
- *x86*
- *On all Intel systems, MSR_ARCH_CAPS is now visible in guests, and
controllable from the VM's config file. For CPUs from 2019 onwards, this
allows guest kernels to see details about hardware fixes for speculative
mitigations.*
- *Support for features new in 4th Gen AMD EPYC Processors:*
- *CPUID_USER_DIS (CPUID Faulting) used by Xen to control PV
guest's view of CPUID data*
- *Support for features new in Intel Sapphire Rapids CPUs:*
- *PKS (Protection Key Supervisor) available to HVM/PVH guests*
- *VM-Notify used by Xen to mitigate certain micro-architectural
pipeline livelocks, instead of crashing the entire server*
- *Bus-lock detection, used by Xen to mitigate (by rate-limiting)
the systemwide impact of a guest misusing atomic instructions*
- *Support for features new in Intel Granite Rapids CPUs:*
- *AVX512-FP16*
- *Add Intel Hardware P-States (HWP) cpufreq driver*
- *Support for enforcing system-wide operation in Data Operand
Independent Timing Mode*
- *RISC-V and PowerPC*
- *Upstream Xen GitLab CI has been set up with full Xen build and a
message printed from Xen early printk*
- *Security*
- *20 XSAs has been published, enhancing the security of the project
to keep it safe from common vulnerabilities*
- *MISRA-C*
- *The project has officially adopted more MISRA-C rules, from four
directives and 24 rules in 4.17 to 6 directives and 65 rules of MISRA-C*
We are doing great things in The Xen Project, and this wouldn't have been
possible without the community working together.
I look forward to seeing what we can all achieve in the future!
Many thanks,
Kelly Choi
Come join the conversation on Matrix:
XenProject: https://matrix.to/#/#XenProject:matrix.org
XenDevel: https://matrix.to/#/#XenDevel:matrix.org
XenSocial: https://matrix.to/#/#XenSocial:matrix.org
Open Source Community Manager
XenServer, Cloud Software Group
It's with great pleasure that I announce our 4.18 PR release!
*Please find the PR article attached here
<https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231120045533/en/Xen-Project-Releases-Version-4.18-with-New-Security-Performance-and-Architecture-Enhancements-for-AIML-Applications>,
and information on our blog here
<https://xenproject.org/2023/11/20/xen-project-releases-version-4-18-with-new-security-performance-and-architecture-enhancements-for-ai-ml-applications/>.*
I want to thank the whole community for their efforts in getting this
release published.
In particular, I'd like to express gratitude to @Henry Wang
<Henry.Wang@arm.com> for his help as the release manager, @George Dunlap
<george.dunlap@cloud.com> for collating the downloads, and the Advisory
Board for their continued support and quotes in the article.
*Some notable features:*
- *Arm*
- *The Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) is now merged in upstream Xen
as a tech preview.*
- *The Arm® Firmware Framework for Arm A-profile (FF-A) framework
support is now merged in upstream Xen as a tech preview.*
- *The memory subsystem in Xen on Arm64 is now more compliant with
the Arm architecture.*
- *x86*
- *On all Intel systems, MSR_ARCH_CAPS is now visible in guests, and
controllable from the VM's config file. For CPUs from 2019 onwards, this
allows guest kernels to see details about hardware fixes for speculative
mitigations.*
- *Support for features new in 4th Gen AMD EPYC Processors:*
- *CPUID_USER_DIS (CPUID Faulting) used by Xen to control PV
guest's view of CPUID data*
- *Support for features new in Intel Sapphire Rapids CPUs:*
- *PKS (Protection Key Supervisor) available to HVM/PVH guests*
- *VM-Notify used by Xen to mitigate certain micro-architectural
pipeline livelocks, instead of crashing the entire server*
- *Bus-lock detection, used by Xen to mitigate (by rate-limiting)
the systemwide impact of a guest misusing atomic instructions*
- *Support for features new in Intel Granite Rapids CPUs:*
- *AVX512-FP16*
- *Add Intel Hardware P-States (HWP) cpufreq driver*
- *Support for enforcing system-wide operation in Data Operand
Independent Timing Mode*
- *RISC-V and PowerPC*
- *Upstream Xen GitLab CI has been set up with full Xen build and a
message printed from Xen early printk*
- *Security*
- *20 XSAs has been published, enhancing the security of the project
to keep it safe from common vulnerabilities*
- *MISRA-C*
- *The project has officially adopted more MISRA-C rules, from four
directives and 24 rules in 4.17 to 6 directives and 65 rules of MISRA-C*
We are doing great things in The Xen Project, and this wouldn't have been
possible without the community working together.
I look forward to seeing what we can all achieve in the future!
Many thanks,
Kelly Choi
Come join the conversation on Matrix:
XenProject: https://matrix.to/#/#XenProject:matrix.org
XenDevel: https://matrix.to/#/#XenDevel:matrix.org
XenSocial: https://matrix.to/#/#XenSocial:matrix.org
Open Source Community Manager
XenServer, Cloud Software Group