Xen 4.6 Released With Many Huge Improvements For Virtualization

The Xen Project has announced version 4.6 of their software this morning, which they describe as the most punctual and highest quality release yet.

The Xen 4.6 hypervisor adds new migration support improvements, the memory event subsystem has been reworked and extended, Xen Security Modules have a default policy, vTPM 2.0 support is in place, grant table scalability has improved, better fairness via a ticket lock, and various other improvements. The x86 hypervisor code also has a new Intel P2M framework, Intel Cache Allocation Technology support, Intel Memory Bandwidth Monitoring, and a variety of other Intel-contributed improvements. In the ARM space there's now support for the Thunder X, support for up to 128 VCPUs on ARM64, and other changes.

Also new with Xen 4.6 is the toolstack adding AHCI disk controller support, improved SPICE/QXL support, reworked Remus, and other changes. The Xen code within the Linux kernel also has performance improvements in mmap, Xen SCSI fron/back-end support, blkfront multi-queue and multi-page ring support, and other changes.

Those wanting to learn more about Xen 4.6 can see today's announcement and there's also more details via the Xen Project Wiki.