Xvisor

This release marks the completion of a major milestone, network support
and runtime-loadable modules.

It adds many new features,
drivers,
and emulators.

Newly added features include
runtime loadable modules,
soft-delay API support,
improved block device support,
input device support,
frame buffer or video device support,
networking support,
Linux compatibility headers for porting drivers,
a Linux-compatible serio device driver framework,
a VTEMU library,
UIP as an optional network stack,
and a lightweight virtual filesystem library.

This release adds a few cleanups and feature additions in the core code, two new emulators, support for four new ARM processors, and SMP guest support. The architecture-independent code now supports advanced host IRQ management, clocksource management, clockchip management, and a bitmap library. Newly-added emulators include an ARM local timer emulator and an ARM A9MP private memory emulator. Newly-added ARM processors include ARM9, Cortex-A9, Cortex-A15 (without VE), and Cortex-A15 (with VE). From this release on, Xvisor ARM supports VExpress-A9 SMP guest.

This release adds a few new features, cleans up the code, and formalizes the coding-style document. New features: wait-for-interrupt support in the VCPU IRQ subsystem; dynamic guest creation/destruction; device clock management support in the device driver framework; an RTC device framework; and a wall-clock subsystem for real-time tracking. ARM 32-bit port: support for emulating cache operations; Xvisor ARM running on BeagleBoard-xM is able to boot the Linux kernel on a Realview-PB-A8 guest. MIPS 32-bit port: Xvisor MIPS boots up and gets to the management terminal.

This release focused on code clean-ups and performance optimizations. New features include function-level profiling support, pass through hardware access to guests, waitqueues and completion locks, workqueues for bottom-half processing, and semaphores and mutexes for threads. The ARM 32-bit port is now able to boot on the BeagleBoard-xM and run a basic boot loader as a guest on Xvisor running on the BeagleBoard-xM.

This initial release supports tree based configuration, tickless and high resolution time keeping, a threading framework, a device driver framework, CPU virtualization, address space virtualization, a device emulation framework, serial port virtualization, and a management terminal. The ARM 32-bit port is able to boot multiple unmodified Linux 2.6.30.10 or Linux 3.0.4
guests with a fairly interactive and smooth Busybox 0.19.2 console. The supported host for Xvisor ARM is a Realview-PB-A8 Board emulated by QEMU, but a port to the Beagle Board is in progress. The MIPS 32-bit port can be compiled but is still a work in progress.