Xen Developer and Design Summit 2019

In this keynote talk, we will give an overview of the state of the Xen Project, trends that impact the project, see whether challenges that surfaced last year have been addressed and how we did it, and highlight new challenges and solutions for the coming year.

Artem will briefly cover what has been done since the first talk on Xen in Automotive domain back in 2013, what is going on now and what is still missing for broad adaptation of Xen in vehicles. The following topics will be covered:

• Embedded/automotive features of Xen
• Collaboration with AGL and GENIVI organizations for standardization
• Efforts on Functional Safety compliance

Artem will also go over typical automotive use scenarios for Xen which may not be the same as generic computing use of hypervisor.

The idea of making Xen secret-free has been floating since Spectre and Meltdown came into light. In this talk we will discuss what is being done and what needs to be done next.

This talk will introduce Dom0-less: a new way of using Xen to build mixed-criticality solutions. Dom0-less is a Xen feature that adds a novel approach to static partitioning based on virtualization. It allows multiple domains to start at boot time directly from the Xen hypervisor, decreasing boot times dramatically. Xen userspace tools, such as xl and libvirt, become optional.

Dom0-less extends the existing device tree based Xen boot protocol to cover information required by additional domains. Binaries, such as kernels and ramdisks, are loaded by the bootloader (u-boot) and advertised to Xen via new device tree bindings.

The audience will learn how to use Dom0-less to partition the system. Uboot and device tree configuration details will be explained to enable the audience to get the most out of this feature. The talk will include a status update and details on future plans.

In​ ​recent​ ​years unikernels have​ ​shown​ ​immense​ ​performance potential​ (e.g., boot times of only a few ms, image sizes of only hundreds of KBs).The​ ​fundamental​ ​drawback​ ​of​ ​unikernels​ ​is​ ​that​ ​they​ ​require​ ​that applications​ ​be​ ​manually​ ​ported​ ​to​ ​the​ ​underlying​ ​minimalistic​ ​OS, needing​ ​both​ ​expert​ ​work​ ​and​ ​often​ ​considerable​ ​amount of​ ​time.​

The Unikraft project provides a unikernel code base and build system that significantly simplifies the building of unikernels. In addition to support for a number CPU architectures, languages and frameworks, Unikraft provides debugging and tracing features that are generally sorely missing from unikernel projects. In this talk we will talk about these features, show a set of preliminary performance numbers, and provide a roadmap for the project's future.

As the number of contributions grow, reviewer bandwidth becomes a bottleneck; and maintainers are always asking for more help. However, ultimately maintainers must at least Ack every patch that goes in; so if you're not a maintainer, how can you contribute? Why should anyone care about your opinion?

This talk will try to lay out some advice and guidelines for non-maintainers, for how they can do code review in a way which will effectively reduce the load on maintainers when they do come to review a patch.