Xen.org 2011 Year in Review

It truly was an amazing year for Xen.org! The key highlights included Dom0 supporting going into mainline Linux kernel, Project Kronos, and renewed focus  Xen for ARM. All three of these projects are examples of standing on the shoulders of giants.

• In 2007, Jeremy Fitzhardinge announced the plan to Xen domU (guest) support in Linux upstream (via pv_ops) with domU support landing in Linux 2.6.23. Every Xen Summit since then had pv_ops updates of some kind and at Xen Summit North America 2011 Konrad described how Linux 3.0 was the first usable Dom0 kernel. (See Konrad’s blog post that details how we got there).
• In 2006, Ewan Mellor sent out a draft specification for the Xen API (XAPI). In 2009, The Xen Cloud Platform was announced and XAPI was released as open source. In 2011 XCP 1.0 and XCP 1.1 were released, Project Kronos was announced, and initial XAPI packages are now available in Debian.
• In 2007, Sang-bum Suh described Samsung’s port of Xen to ARM. In 2011, Stefano Stabellini announced the Xen port to Cortex-A15 / ARMv7.

In 2011, Xen.org welcomed Lars Kurth as our community manager. Lars’ impact can be seen most notably in a formalized governance model, a new Xen wiki, and numerous events that Xen.org held and attended (described below).

Technology

• In 2011, Xen 4.1 was released (4.1.1 and 4.1.2 as well). In addition to working with upstream Linux, the Xen team also worked with upstream QEMU to get Xen support in QEMU.
• Other XCP Highlights included  development moved to github, OpenStack Support, CloudStack Support, and OpenNebula Support.
• 2011 was the year of the first two Xen Hackathons: Xen Hackathon Cambridge and Xen Hackathon Munich.
• We had five students work on Google Summer of Code projects.

Xen.org Events

• XenSummits: Xen Summit North America 2011,  XenSummit Asia 2011
• Hackathons
• Documentation Days
• Xen Day Boston 2011

Xen.org at External Community Events

• OSCON
• UDS Oneiric
• OpenStack Diablo
• SVLUG Meeting
• OpenStack Essex Design Summit and OpenStack Conference
• UDS Precise
• LinuxCon Brazil
• Build an Open Source Cloud Boston

Ian Pratt gave his thoughts on Xen past, present and future at Xen Summit Asia 2011. His slides and a video are available: (slides: http://www.slideshare.net/xen_com_mgr/xenorg-the-past-the-present-and-exciting-future video: http://vimeo.com/33056576)