Xen Project 4.12 Release Notes

Overview

Xen Project 4.12.0 was released on 2nd of April 2019.

Xen Project 4.12.0 is the work of 9 months of development.

Also see Xen Project 4.12 Acknowledgements

New Feature Highlights

The list of new features can be found on the following page: Xen Project 4.12 Feature List

You can find information on support status (including security support) for various features in SUPPORT.md and Hypervisor Support Matrix.

Documentation is available on Xen Project 4.12 Man Pages

Build Requirements

The default installation prefix has been changed to /usr/local. Previously the default installation prefix was /usr To restore the previous behaviour, specify --prefix=/usr when running ./configure, e.g.:

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr

If you choose to accept the new default then be sure to cleanup any residual bits of the old installation in the old prefix, especially libraries and tools which you might pick up by mistake.

Due to this change it may also now be necessary to run /sbin/ldconfig as root after installing Xen.

Note also that Xen now requires gcc v4.1 or greater.

Build

First of all you will have to get the Xen 4.12 source code, which you can either download through our release tarball (including signature) from our download page. Alternatively, you can get the source in the following way:

• With a recent enough git (>= 1.7.8.2) just pull from the proper tag (RELEASE-4.12.0) from the xen.git repo directly:

git clone -b RELEASE-4.12.0 https://xenbits.xen.org/git-http/xen.git

• With an older git version (and/or if that does not work, e.g. complaining with a message like this: Remote branch RELEASE-4.12.0 not found in upstream origin, using HEAD instead), do the following:

git clone https://xenbits.xen.org/git-http/xen.git
cd xen
git checkout RELEASE-4.12.0

Build instructions can be found at Compiling Xen From Source or Compiling Xen From Source on NetBSD.

Namespace changes affecting downstreams and users

• kdd (tool for debugging guest OSes with the windows kernel debugger) has been renamed to xen-kdd in order to reduce namespace pollution.

• The fsimage library used by pygrub, which does not have a stable ABI, and the corresponding python module, have been renamed to 'xenfsimage' (to reduce namespace pollution). Any out-of-tree users of this library will have to be updated.

Known issues

While we do the utmost to make the release perfect, there are always fixes which are not quite complete on time. We will add those here. So if you run into trouble, please check this section.

Currently known issues are:

• None currently known