This document provides an overview and schedule for a Xen Project conference in Nanjing, China. It outlines the agenda items, including sessions for attendees to register, rate sessions, and participate in hands-on design sessions. It also summarizes highlights from 2017-2018, including governance changes, releases, new subprojects like Unikraft, and statistics on code contributions. Finally, it outlines several technical focus areas for the Xen Project community going forward, such as safety certification, a minimal Xen build, and work on x86 features.

1. Lars Kurth
Community Manager, Xen Project
Chairman, Xen Project Advisory Board
lars_kurth

2. Welcome to Nanjing

3. Diamond Sponsors
Gold Sponsors

5. 1. All: Register
Verification Code: Nanjing2018
2. Session Host: Create Session
Anytime before 11:00 of each day
3. All: Rate Sessions
Which sessions do you want to attend?
Check daily and indicate your preference
for new sessions
Thank you to George Dunlap
for putting this together

6. 1. All: Register
Verification Code: Nanjing2018
2. Session Host: Create Session
Anytime before 11:00 of each day
3. All: Rate Sessions
Which sessions do you want to attend?
Check daily and indicate your preference
for new sessions
4. Admins: Before lunch
We will run the scheduler ➜ Final schedule for the day
5. Session Host: After lunch
Stand up, give a 1 minute pitch of your session. Ask attendees to follow you!
Thank you to George Dunlap
for putting this together

7. Design Sessions are hands-on sessions to solve design, technical,
process and other community problems. They are not presentations.
1. Session Host: Introduce the topics and/or problems you want to solve
You can use a short presentation to do this
If the topic is fuzzy: come up with a list of sub-topics / discussion areas asking the audience
2. Session Host: Nominate a note taker
Ask the audience, or arrange for a colleague to do this
3. All: Huddle and work together to solve the problem
Tips: raise your hand if you can’t get heard
Ask clarifying questions
Contribute to the discussion
4. Note taker: Writes Notes
After the meeting send to community.manager@xenproject.org
or directly to the xen-devel mailing list: Subject: Design Session …

8. Highlights of 2017 and 2018

9. Governance & Convention Changes
SUPPORT.md
R: in MAINTAINERS
add_maintainers.pl
Informal batching of XSAs
Security Issues, Spectre & Meltdown
Remedial work impacted many x86 Developers
Slow-down of x86 feature development
Releases and Subprojects
Xen Project Hypervisor 4.10 & 4.11 Releases
Windows PV Drivers: now a mature project
New: Unikraft Subproject (Simon Kuenzer, NEC)
New: ViryaOS (Stefano Stabellini, Xilinx)
New Advisory Board Member
Bitdefender

10. 31%
28%
20%
13%
8%
M arketing Dev eloper Ev ents New Test H W
RunningT es t Infra RunningInfra
Advisory Board Spending 2018

11. More and Better Collaboration
x86 Community Call
Other topic specific calls: functional safety, PCI passthrough
Reworking the Hypervisor Core
PVH DomU (no passthrough, QEMU not required)
PVH Dom0 – experimental
PVH Shim (backwards compatibility)
PV / HVM code path separation:
progress at around 60% through the code
Emerging Embedded & Automotive
Plan for Safety Certification
More usage and leadership from embedded
OpenXT community planning to align with upstream
ViryaOS

12. Thank you!
Keep up the good work!
Build bridges and relationships!
Make use of the next 3 days!

14. 0
2000
4000
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18000
20000
2014 2015 2016 2017 2018fc
PatchesPosted
Non-selfComments
GitCommits

15. 0
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20000
2014 2015 2016 2017 2018fc
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2014 2015 2016 2017 2018fc

16. 50%
22%
4%
3%
3%
3%
15%
44%
27%
6%
2%
3%
5%
8%
47%
26%
8%
5%
2%
2%
8%
52%
22%
11%
1%
5%
6%
Citrix
Suse
ARM
Intel
AMD
Oracle
EPAM
Amazon
Gentoo
Huawei
Other
2016
2017
2018
2011-15

17. 0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 *
<6
Res t (>5)
Res t
Nex t 10
Nex t 5
Top 5
208 248 285 353 336 346 353 232* Commenters

18. Community relies on top 5 contributing companies for code reviews
2016 2017 2018 (June 13)

19. Commits to xen.git
Total: Average growth of 11% YoY since 2014
x86: Average commits tripled ➜ has caused the x86 review bottleneck
48% of commits are now x86 related (past long-term average was 25%)
Diversity similar to previous years
Code Reviews
2014-15 we had problems with code reviews (arguments, complex features, …)
We addressed some of these in issues in 2016 ➜ Training, Design Sessions, …
From 2017, we were struggling with code review bandwidth on x86
– Roger, Wei and George started picking up x86 code reviews
– Spectre & Meltdown also had a negative impact
– Some of the new x86 features are very complex ➜x86 community call, feature mentoring
But: we still rely on a small number of individuals for reviews

21. Was created after a Developer Summit presentation last
year, launched in December 2017
Targets Linux, KVM and Xen
Detailed presentations at the summit on Friday:
Unleashing the Power of Unikernels with Unikraft
Unikraft: An easy way of crafting Unikernels on Arm
Seeing first contributions from outside of NEC

22. Items I am aware of (not a complete list)
• PV drivers: input, sound & DRM (EPAM)
• Xen OP-TEE support (EPAM)
• Co-processor (GPU) sharing framework (EPAM)
• Hard real-time support (EPAM)
• Power Management & HMP (Aggios, XILINX)
• Startup latency: Boot multiple VMs in parallel from Device Tree (XILINX)
• RTOS Dom0 / Dom0-less system (Multiple)
• Code size reduction for Safety certification (Multiple)
• Inter-VM communication primitives for hypervisor mediated data exchange (BAE)
• Virtual TPMs for Xen in OpenEmbedded meta-virtualization (BrainTrust)
• New: ViryaOS (Stefano Stabellini, XILINX)

23. Stage 2:
Createsharedcertificationartefacts under theguidance/withsupport fromcertificationpartner
Adapt development processes, wherefeasible.
4CompleteMISRA
compliancework for
majority of issues.
MISRA Compliance
1Identify compliance
partner that is willingto
work withtheproject ➜
PRQA
2WIP: Formalize
relationshipbetween
vendor andtheproject
3Iteratively address
complianceissues within
theXenProject
community: start with
potentially controversial
andhighimpact issues.
Certification Partners
1WIP: Identify possible
certificationpartners and
understandthe
framework they are
willingtowork with.
Note: Dornerworks is a
possiblepartner given
past certification
experienceonXen
2Formalizerelationship
betweenvendor(s) and
theproject
Dom0
RTOS(e.g. FreeRTOS) as
Dom0, and/or Dom0-less
stack withminimal
management tools.
LeadCommunity
Members
• EPAM, XILINX
• Dornerworks andStar
Labas possible
collaborators
Minimal Xen
Createminimal Kbuildfor
Xenas areference, using
Renesas R-Car as starting
point (WIP)
LeadCommunity
Members
• StefanoStabellini
• EPAM, Dornerworks,
XILINXandothers as
collaborators
Reliabledataabout achievableminimal codesizeand
community challenges that needtoberesolved
Note: Dom0andMinimal Xendonot needtobe
completetoget sufficient data

24. Core Architecture (Citrix & Suse & Oracle)
PVH: x86, PCI Passthrough, QEMU interface/sandboxing
Grant tables/zero copy on PV drivers (Oracle)
Security
Panopticon: See no secrets, leak no secrets
Security Process Consultation
Large and Complex x86 Features
NVDIMM (Intel & Citrix)
Intel Processor Trace (Intel)
SGX Virtualization (Intel)

25. Picture by Lars Kurth