Xen Project Summit 2024: Full Schedule

June 4 - 6, 2024
Lisbon, Portugal
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08:00 WEST

Registration + Badge Pick-up

Tuesday June 4, 2024 08:00 - 17:00 WEST
Foyer

Registration + Badge Pick-up

09:00 WEST

Welcome & Opening Remarks - Kelly Choi, Community Manager, Cloud Software Group, XenServer

Speakers

Kelly Choi

Community Manager, XenServer, Cloud Software Group.

Kelly Choi is the Community Manager for the Xen Project. Kelly collaborates closely with the Advisory Board, developers, and The Linux Foundation to raise awareness and advance the project. Kelly champions initiatives to elevate and spotlight Xen's mission, spanning different domains... Read More →

Tuesday June 4, 2024 09:00 - 09:10 WEST
Liberdade I

Keynote Sessions

09:10 WEST

Xen Project 2024 Weather Report - Kelly Choi, XenServer, Cloud Software Group.

This talk offers a concise yet comprehensive overview of the latest advancements within the Xen ecosystem, focusing on key updates by the Community Manager. Discover how the Xen community collaborates to drive innovation, and what we've been working on in the past 12 months. You can also expect to gain a deeper understanding of the collaborative efforts shaping the future of Xen and learn how you can contribute too.

Speakers

Kelly Choi

Community Manager, XenServer, Cloud Software Group.

Tuesday June 4, 2024 09:10 - 09:40 WEST
Liberdade I

Keynote Sessions

09:45 WEST

Xen and the Art of Hypervisor Maintenance - Jacus de Beer, General Manager, XenServer

How do you turn a Cambridge University research project into a technology platform running some of the most influential businesses in the world? This keynote will explore some of the history of Xen and will provide some behind the scenes insight into what it takes for XenServer to transform the open source Xen Project hypervisor into an enterprise grade hypervisor.

Speakers

Jacus de Beer

General Manager, XenServer

Jacus de Beer is General Manager of the XenServer business unit at Cloud Software Group, where he is responsible for the product management and development of the XenServer virtualisation platform. For the past 10 years, he played a key leadership role in the continued delivery of... Read More →

Tuesday June 4, 2024 09:45 - 10:15 WEST
Liberdade I

Keynote Sessions

10:20 WEST

Unikraft Has Arrived: The Lightweight, Fast, Usable Solution for Cloud Deployments - Razvan Deaconescu & Andrei Stan, Unikraft

Unikraft (https://unikraft.org/) is a fast, secure and open-source Unikernel Development Kit. Started as a research project under the Xen Foundation, Unikraft is now reaching technical (and commercial) maturity, being able to run a large set of applications with all the advantages typical to a unikernel: fast booting, low memory footprint, virtual machine isolation. During this talk we will share the current technical state of the project, together with updates that make it seamless to integrate popular apps running in cloud workloads (web servers, proxies, programming frameworks, databases etc.). Using binary-compatibility mode, Unikraft is able to integrate common Docker-based setups and facilitate the rapid integration of existing applications into the unikernel technology. With the help of its companion tool, KraftKit, Unikraft is able to leverage the inherent unikernel advantages to easily run existing apps. This helps seamlessly use and deploy Unikraft apps on different platforms and architectures, with a recent addition of Xen ARM64 to the list of supported platforms.

Speakers

Razvan Deaconescu

Community Manager, Unikraft

Razvan is an Associate Professor at University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest, Romania, the Computer Science and Engineering Department and Community Manager for the Unikraft OSS community (and Unikraft GmbH). He's primarily interested in operating systems and security, with a penchant... Read More →

Andrei Stan

Andrei Stan, Unikraft

I'm a Computer Engineering student at University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest, Romania and, since last year, a contributor to the Unikraft OSS, focusing on Xen support. My main interests are in Operating Systems and Distributed Systems.

Tuesday June 4, 2024 10:20 - 10:50 WEST
Liberdade I

Keynote Sessions

10:50 WEST

Break & Networking

Tuesday June 4, 2024 10:50 - 11:05 WEST
Foyer

Breaks / Networking / Special Events

11:05 WEST

Next Generation Xen Architecture for Automotive - Stefano Stabellini, AMD

Today, Xen is the leading Open Source hypervisor in Automotive. Over the past decade, the Xen Community has tirelessly worked to develop several key features that now coalesce into a top-tier automotive solution. Elements such as Hyperlaunch, Virtio with Grants, PCI Passthrough, Cortex-R52 support, and Safety Certifiability are crucial pieces of a larger puzzle poised to empower the next generation of vehicles. This presentation will show you the complete picture. In discussions about Automotive software, the focus often falls on the In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) system. Yet, IVI is only one among numerous components requiring a hypervisor for real-time and isolation. The future of vehicles is not about one Xen but many. This presentation will illustrate Xen running across multiple heterogeneous systems within a single vehicle, spanning x86 to ARM A-profile and R-profile. Xen will facilitate software deployment anywhere, enabling seamless device sharing across different SoCs as though they were a single system. Join us in this presentation as we introduce a new, legacy-free, and groundbreaking virtualization architecture that propels Xen into the future of Automotive systems.

Speakers

Stefano Stabellini

Fellow, AMD

Stefano Stabellini is a Fellow at AMD, where he leads system software architecture and the virtualization team. Previously, at Aporeto, he created a virtualization-based security solution for containers and authored several security articles. Stefano has been involved in Xen development... Read More →

Tuesday June 4, 2024 11:05 - 11:35 WEST
Liberdade I

Session Presentations

11:40 WEST

Xen Functional Safety - an Update - Ayan Kumar Halder & Michal Orzel, AMD

Xen is a type 1 hypervisor supported on x86, Arm (soon RISC-V and PPC) platforms. Certain aspects of Xen, such as its dom0less configuration, make it suitable for use in automotive and embedded systems. As an open-source project with ongoing development, aligning it with functional safety standards presents a perpetual challenge. To address this challenge, we adopted a stepwise approach. Initially, we are integrating MISRA C rules into Xen. Over 80 rules have been accepted, and violations are being fixed. We are undertaking reverse engineering of the code to establish requirements. We delineate top-level market requirements, provided by partners, which are then refined into product requirements and subsequently into software safety requirements (SSR). Each SSR can be translated into one or more test cases. Comprehensive traceability is maintained throughout, ensuring alignment between requirements, test cases, test implementations, and test jobs. Additionally, architectural specifications are being drafted to elucidate how features operate within Xen. We are also exploring additional testing methodologies, including hardware functionality testing and fault injection techniques.

Speakers

Ayan Kumar Halder

MTS, AMD

Ayan has been working on Arm based low based software stack for the past 14 years. He has worked on variety of projects ranging from board bringup, post silicon validation to developing new features. He has contributed upstream to Xen, Linux and Zephyr. More recently he is been actively... Read More →

Michal Orzel

AMD, Service Provider, AMD

Experienced embedded software engineer specializing in ARM architecture and virtualization technologies, currently working on Xen Hypervisor at AMD. Prior roles include involvement with Xen and Mali GPU DDK projects at Arm, along with experience in automotive software product development... Read More →

Tuesday June 4, 2024 11:40 - 12:10 WEST
Liberdade I

Session Presentations

12:15 WEST

Open Source Safety Elements - Out of Context? - Nicole Pappler, AlektoMetis

As several open source projects are heading towards functional safety, mostly to achieve a safety certification as a Safety Element out of Context (SEooC) the question of what this really means comes up quite often. There are usually three stakeholders in a project like this The project community that needs to provide the qualification evidences and keep up with the requests from a certification authority The assessor representing the certification authority, and The integrator, who actually wants to use the certified software As all these stakeholders have different expectations of what this certification will require, there are a lot of different rumours and opinions out there regarding functional safety certification. This talk will give an introduction to what qualification evidence is usually prepared and assessed for a SEooC certification, what this means for the project and how it can actually be integrated into a safety relevant software system. There will be examples how the Zephyr Project addresses this, to initiate cross-pollination between the safety open source projects and working groups.

Speakers

Nicole Pappler

Safety Expert, AlektoMetis

Nicole has worked in different projects developing safety relevant embedded software before starting as an independent assessor. With now more than twenty years of experience in the industry, she supported several customers to show their compliance with safety, security and quality... Read More →

Tuesday June 4, 2024 12:15 - 12:45 WEST
Liberdade I

Session Presentations

12:45 WEST

Lunch Break

Tuesday June 4, 2024 12:45 - 13:45 WEST
Bonsai

Breaks / Networking / Special Events

13:45 WEST

A Virtio Message Based Transport - Bertrand Marquis, Arm

Existing virtio transports are based on a PCI bus or MMIO and work well when the hardware is emulated (for example in Qemu) or when a trap and emulate handling is easily possible. But for a type 1 hypervisor like Xen or between heterogeneous systems, it becomes really complex to use existing Virtio transports for device emulation. During this presentation, I will cover: - The challenges faced by Xen to support existing virtio transports. - How a message based transport could address these challenges. - Detail the proposal for a new fully message based Virtio transport. - How FF-A standard can offer an hypervisor agnostic solution to support this transport.

Speakers

Bertrand Marquis

Principal Software Architect, Arm

Part of Arm Technology group since 2023 working on FFA specification, hypervisors and functional safety. Xen project maintainer since 2022. Previously part of Arm Open Source group, working on hypervisors for Automotive and Xen hypervisor. Before working for Arm, Avionic RTOS kernel... Read More →

Tuesday June 4, 2024 13:45 - 14:15 WEST
Liberdade I

Session Presentations

14:20 WEST

Xen VPCI Weather Report - Stewart Hildebrand, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc

Xen vPCI has been in development for several years. vPCI is the PCI passthrough mechanism used in PCI passthrough on Arm and PVH on x86. Multiple downstreams already have PCI passthrough on Arm available in some form, and it has recently gained upstream traction. In this talk we focus on vPCI for Arm and x86, its history, current status, and future work. A PCI locking rework patch was recently accepted upstream, thanks to the work of several contributors, reviewers, and maintainers. We discuss possible methods for enabling IOREQ (e.g., Qemu-backed virtio-pci) and vPCI simultaneously. Finally, we discuss IOREQ and vPCI in a dom0less/hyperlaunch configuration.

Speakers

Stewart Hildebrand

MTS Software Development Engineer, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc

Stewart has worked with Xen on Arm for 8 years, with a focus on PCI passthrough on Arm in the last 1.5 years.

Tuesday June 4, 2024 14:20 - 14:50 WEST
Liberdade I

Session Presentations

14:55 WEST

Live-Update: An Update on the Journey to Replace the Hypervisor with Limited Downtime - Elias El Yandouzi, Amazon Web Services

Four years ago, AWS engineers were presenting the first design of Live-update and were looking for feedback. Now, this tool is production ready and used to manage and deploy new versions across the fleet. In this talk, we'll share a status update and cover in-depth how we finally designed Live-update to replace the running hypervisor binary without disrupting the running instances.

Speakers

Elias El Yandouzi

Software Development Engineer, Amazon Web Services

Elias El Yandouzi is a software development engineer in the AWS EC2 team. He worked on Live-Update to improve the performance and make it production ready.

Tuesday June 4, 2024 14:55 - 15:25 WEST
Liberdade I

Session Presentations

15:25 WEST

Break & Networking

Tuesday June 4, 2024 15:25 - 15:40 WEST
Foyer

Breaks / Networking / Special Events

15:40 WEST

Interfacing Rust with Xen - Alejandro Vallejo, XenServer BU, Cloud Software Group

A description of the issues involved in making native interfaces to the hypervisor in non-C languages and how to overcome them, with a special focus on the Rust programming language. * What are you hoping to get from your presentation? Create momentum towards Rust development in the Xen toolstack and increase awareness of its potential. * What do you expect the audience to gain from your presentation? A sneak peak into what a future Rust-based interface could look like and a roadmap about how to get there. Also a plan to streamline the process for other languages without resorting to writing wrappers around existing libraries. * How will your presentation help better the ecosystem? Rust is well known for its memory-safety properties, and its popularity is skyrocketing. Many people would like to see a migration of existing interfacing code into this language, but are unaware how such a thing could come to happen.

Speakers

Alejandro Vallejo

Senior Software Engineer, XenServer, Cloud Software Group

XenServer hypervisor engineer, contributor to the Xen project and (very) vocal advocate of usage of the Rust programming language and formal methods.

Tuesday June 4, 2024 15:40 - 16:10 WEST
Liberdade I

Session Presentations

16:15 WEST

Implementing Requirement Traceability in the Xen FuSa Project with OpenFastTrace - Ayan Kumar Halder, AMD & Sebastian Bär, Exasol

Requirements define your product. They ensure that the user needs are met. OpenFastTrace (OFT) verifies the integrity of a product's requirement structure, thus avoiding the costs of common mistakes like forgetting to implement requirements or to remove obsolete ones. OFT crawls specification documents and code and correlates them with the help of special unique IDs. In OFT requirements are treated like code, because if there is one thing that software makers excel at, it's handling code. Managing requirement documents like code allows using the same tried and true tools for version control and reviews. The main authoring formats are Markdown and reStructuredText. They are simple, ubiquitous and robust. You can bet, you will still be able to read them in 50 years from now. Annotations in comments of test and implementation tell OFT what is covered where in the code. The Xen functional safety project uses OFT to track requirements with test specs and tests. The traceability report shows full bidirectional links from the market requirements to the test jobs.

Speakers

Ayan Kumar Halder

MTS, AMD

Sebastian Bär

Senior Engineering Manager, Exasol

Sebastian Bär started programming with twelve on a CPC 464 and kept writing software through school and university where he studied communication electronics. At Lucent Technologies he developed software for internet backbones. After a fifteen year detour in the automotive software... Read More →

Tuesday June 4, 2024 16:15 - 16:45 WEST
Liberdade I

Session Presentations

08:00 WEST

Registration + Badge Pick-up

Wednesday June 5, 2024 08:00 - 17:00 WEST
Foyer

Registration + Badge Pick-up

09:00 WEST

Welcome Back & Remarks - Kelly Choi, Community Manager, Cloud Software Group, XenServer

Speakers