visoreXtensible Versatile hypervISOR

Xvisor v0.2.3 Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 20:26:41 +0530  |  Posted by: Anup Patel

In this release, our prime focus has been code quality, SMP support, and newly introduced ARM64 (or ARMv8a or AArch64) port. In addition, we also have new drivers, features and emulators.

New Features:

• Improved code quality using Coverity Scan
• Synchronous and Asynchronous IPIs for SMP Host (EXPERIMENTAL)
• Crude load balancer for SMP Host (EXPERIMENTAL)
• USB driver framework (EXPERIMENTAL)
• 64bit atomic operations
• Read-write spinlocks
• Statistics gathering for VCPU state transitions

New Drivers:

• Sun4i MMC controller driver

New Emulators:

• HW-assisted GICv2 (VGIC) emulator
• Power State and Coordination Interface (PSCI) emulator

ARM 32-bit Port:

• Added hypercall instruction for WFE, YIELD and SEV instructions to improve performance of SMP guests on SMP host
• Added hypercall instruction for SMC instruction based PSCI calls
• Use Image instead of zImage for booting Linux on VersatilePB, Realview-EB-MPCore, Realview-PB-A8, and VExpress-A9 guests

ARM 32-bit with VE Port:

• Enabled HW-assisted GICv2 (VGIC) emulation for Realview-PB-A8 and VExpress-A15 guest on VExpress-A15 host
• Added data abort, prefetch abort and undefined expection injections
• Added support for HVC and SMC instruction based PSCI calls
• Use Image instead of zImage for booting Linux on VExpress-A15 guest

ARM 64-bit Port:

• Introduced ARM64 port which is very similar to ARM32VE port because of similarity in HW virtualization features supported by ARM32VE and ARM64 CPUs
• Introduced complete DTB based Generic-v8 board support which will enables us to boot same Xvisor binary on different ARM64 hosts
• Introduced fully para-virtualized Virt-v8 ARM64 guest having only VirtIO devices
• Supports both ARM32 and ARM64 guest on ARMv8 Foundation Model
• Supports HW-assisted GICv2 (VGIC) emulation for Realview-PB-A8, VExpress-A15, and Virt-v8 guest on ARMv8 Foundation Model
• Supports HVC32, HVC64, SMC32 and SMC64 instructions based PSCI calls

x86_64 Port:

• No significant updates