Version 4.18 brings first ports to RISC-V and PowerPC, support for next-gen datacenter CPUs
The Xen Project has quietly debuted version 4.18 of its eponymous hypervisor – the year’s only release of the virtualization tool.
The update appeared on November 17 and The Register understands a formal announcement will follow on Monday, November 20, US time.
This is not a direction-changing release. It merely offers worthy updates such as 20 security fixes.
Ports to the RISC-V and PowerPC architectures have advanced to what the org describes as « Gitlab-CI doing ‘Early printk’ (i.e., ‘Hello world’ implementation). »
On Arm, Xen’s developers have merged Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) as a tech preview and done likewise for the Arm Firmware Framework for Arm A-profile. The Arm64 memory subsystem has been made more compliant with the Arm architecture.
For x86 machines, Intel users can now see MSR_ARCH_CAPS info in guests, and controllable from the VM’s config file.
