Event Report: Xen Project Developer Summit 2015

This year’s Xen Project Developer Summit is over! We had two days packed with highly technical sessions that were attended by 120 delegates. Our sessions have – as always – been very interactive with lots of discussions during and after the talks. Of course we did also have lots of time for in-corridor conversations during breaks, which most of us look forward to every year.

Andrew Cooper from Citrix is giving an introduction of Migration v2 in Xen 4.6. Check out the PDF and video.

Session Recordings and Slides

Most of the slides are already available as PDFs on the event website. We will re-post the slides later on our slideshare channel and on the Xen Project Website.
Video recordings of the conference sessions are already posted on our youtube channel and will also be posted on the Xen Project Website. Check out some of my personal highlights:

Security: xSplice – Live Patching the Xen Hypervisor

by Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk, Oracle

Other security, robustness and QoS related talks that are worth checking out are

• Virtual Machine Introspection with Xen
• VM Introspection: Practical Applications
• A Fault Tolerant Virtualization Server Based on Xen
• QEMU Security Vulnerability Automatic Discovery by Symbolic Execution
• Achieving QoS in Server Virtualization

User Stories: Virtualizing the Locomotive: Ready, Set, Go!

by Mark Kraeling, GE Transportation
A great Xen and Virtualization user story showing how Xen and Virtualization is used in extreme circumstances.

Other user stories that are worth checking out are

• Hyper: Make VM’s Run Like Containers – and a related talk on ongoing work: Xen Containers: Better Way to Run Docker Containers
• Live Migration at AliCloud – Benefits, Challenges, Developments, and Future Works – more on migration in the following talks: Migration (v2)
• Deploying Real-World Software Today as Unikernels on Xen with Rumprun

Hardware Support: ARM Virtualization Extensions

by Marc Zyngier & Thomas Molgaard, ARM Ltd

You may also want to check out the following talks covering new hardware features on Xen:

• x86: Intel Graphics Virtualization Technology Update
• ARM: Improve ARM Guest Performance with 64KB Pages
• x86: Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) Support in Xen
• ARM: PCI Passthrough Support in Xen Hypervisor for ARMv8
• x86: Achieving QoS in Server Virtualization
• ARM: Getting U-Boot FIT for Xen/li>

Xen and OpenStack

by Stefano Stabellini, Citrix

You may also want to check out the following feature update talks:

• Xen 4.6 and Beyond
• Latest News on Xen Support in libvirt
• Scheduling in Xen: Past, Present and Future
• Faster, Improved Guest Model for Xen
• Project Raisin
• Xen Project Weather Report

For more recordings check out our youtube channel!

Joint KVM and Xen Hackathon and Social Event

The joint activities between Xen and KVM have also been a great success, bringing developers from both communities more closely together. In particular the joint social event was a great success. I overheard many constructive conversations among members of both communities. In some cases, members of both communities were competing with each other in the bowling alley and playing pool: who said that a little bit of friendly competition can’t be fun (-: We will work with the organisers of KVM Forum such that we can build on this cooperation next year.