Xen and the Art of Embedded Systems Virtualization - Stefano Stabellini, Aporeto
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 2017-02-28

Xen and the Art of Embedded Systems Virtualization - Stefano Stabellini, Aporeto

Hypervisors are becoming more and more widespread in embedded environments, from automotive to medical and avionics. Their use case is different from traditional server and desktop virtualization, and so are their requirements. This talk will explain why hypervisors are used in embedded, and the unique challenges posed by these environments to virtualization technologies.

Xen, a popular open source hypervisor, was born to virtualize x86 Linux systems for the data center. It is now the leading open source hypervisor for ARM embedded platforms. The presentation will show how the ARM port of Xen differs from its x86 counterpart. It will go through the fundamental design decisions that made Xen a good choice for ARM embedded virtualization. The talk will explain the implementation of key features such as device assignment and interrupt virtualization.

About Stefano Stabellini
Stefano Stabellini serves as virtualization expert in a new dynamic team at Aporeto. Previously he was Senior Principal Software Engineer at Citrix, leading a small group of Open Source engineers working on Xen Project.Stefano has been involved in Xen development since 2007, focusing on several different projects, spanning from Qemu to Xen and the Linux kernel. He created libxenlight in November 2009 and started the Xen port to ARM with virtualization extensions with Ian Campbell in 2011. Currently he maintains Xen support in Qemu, libxenlight, and Xen on ARM in Linux.