Xen Project 4.21 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:
- The minimum toolchain requirements have increased for some architectures.
- Linux based device model stubdomains are now fully supported.
- x86: Introduce new PDX compression algorithm to cope with Intel Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids having sparse memory maps.
- x86: Allow controlling the MTRR cache attribute of the Xen platform PCI device BAR for HVM guests, to improve performance of guests using it to map the grant table or foreign memory.
- x86: New amd-cppc/amd-cppc-epp cpufreq driver.
- x86: PVH xenstore-stubdom now supports Live Update.
- x86: Resizable BARs is supported for PVH dom0.
- x86: Support PCI passthrough for HVM domUs when dom0 is PVH (note SR-IOV capability usage is not yet supported on PVH dom0).
- ARM: Ability to enable stack protector.
- ARM: GICv3.1 eSPI (Extended Shared Peripheral Interrupts) support for Xen and guest domains.
- ARM: SMMU handling for PCIe passthrough.
- ARM: R-Car Gen4 PCI host controller support.
- ARM: SCI SCMI SMC single-agent support.
- ARM: Initial support for MPU, R82, and R52: reaches the early boot stages.
- RISCV: Basic UART support and external interrupts (APLIC/IMSIC only) handling for hypervisor mode.
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, support for booting dom0less guests is being added. The work will be included in the next few releases.
