Xen Project 4.9 Release Notes

Overview

Xen Project 4.9.0 was released on 28th of June, 2017.

Xen Project 4.9.0 is the work of 6.6 months of development (4.2 months of actual development, 2.2 months of hardening), with 1549 changesets.

Also see Xen Project 4.9 Acknowledgements

New Feature Highlights

The list of new features can be found on the following page: Xen Project 4.9 Feature List

You can also see an evolution of features on Xen Project Release Features

Documentation is available on Xen Project 4.9 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 4.9 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-4.9.0) from the xen.git repo directly:

git clone -b RELEASE-4.9.0 git://xenbits.xenproject.org/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-4.9.0 not found in upstream origin, using HEAD instead), do the following:

git clone git://xenbits.xenproject.org/xen.git
cd xen
git checkout RELEASE-4.9.0

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

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:

• Xen may fail to boot on some Skull Canyon Intel NUCs. The symptom is a lack of progress messages after the bootloader. The cause is a buggy BIOS. There is a workaround available: you can backport git commit 5ec164fd61bd8fc7adfb1ca2907d9159eeb1e37b "x86/boot: re-arrange how/when we do disk I/O".