Xen Project Contributor Spotlight: Irby Thompson

The Xen Project is comprised of a diverse set of member companies and contributors that are committed to the growth and success of the Xen Project Hypervisor. The Xen Project Hypervisor is a staple technology for server and cloud vendors, and is gaining traction in the embedded, security and automotive space. This blog series highlights the companies contributing to the changes and growth being made to the Xen Project and how the Xen Project technology bolsters their business.

Name: Irby Thompson
Title: Founder & CEO
Company: Star Lab Corp.

When did you start contributing to the Xen Project?
The Star Lab team started contributing to the Xen Project in 2015. At that time, our team had completed an extensive trade study of existing open-source and proprietary hypervisors, and determined that the Xen Project codebase and community offered the best security, stability, features, and performance available in the virtualization marketplace.
How does contributing to the Xen Project benefit your company?
Our contributions to the Xen Project help make the ecosystem stronger, while also enabling the entire community to adopt and benefit from our patches. For example, our team upstreamed kconfig support into Xen in 2016 in order to make the core hypervisor codebase more modular, and thus more adaptable across a wide range of industries. Likewise, Star Lab directly benefits from the many Xen Project developers who add new features, review source code, perform security and performance testing, and share lessons learned.
How does the Xen Project’s technology help your business?
The Xen Project hypervisor provides a robust foundation upon which industry-specific solutions can be built. Star Lab is primarily in the business of developing and deploying Crucible, a Xen-based secure embedded virtualization platform for security-critical operational environments, including aerospace & defense, industrial, transportation, and telecommunications. By leveraging Xen as the foundation for Crucible, our team has been able to focus attention on addressing customer-specific needs.
What are some of the major changes you see with virtualization and the transition to cloud native computing?
Virtualization is quickly displacing both hardware (below) and operating systems (above) as the framework upon which modern systems are built. The smart abstractions made possible by virtualization reduce dependencies and make software applications easier to deploy, secure, and maintain. The future will see a merger of traditional virtualization with DevOps-style containerization to get the best qualities of both worlds and enable run-anywhere computing.
What advice would you give someone considering contributing to the Xen Project?
The ecosystem around Xen Project is full of interesting subprojects like MirageOS / unikernels, disaggregation / subdomains, tooling, and Arm support, all places where more development help is needed. Many volunteers make light work, so jump in and get involved!
What excites you most about the future of Xen?
The Xen Project continues to evolve from traditional server virtualization into other markets such as the embedded / IoT space, where the benefits of virtualization are just beginning to be realized. For example, Xen Project has the potential to be viable in safety-critical environments where a type-1 hypervisor can provide strong isolation and independence guarantees. Xen-based virtualization drives innovation in these industries and leads to significant cost savings over legacy architectures. At Star Lab, we are excited to be involved in driving the future of Xen Project!