If the open supply RISC-V CPU structure is to change into a viable possibility for servers, its software program ecosystem will want a strong hypervisor.

Which is why The Register noted in 2021 {that a} challenge had commenced to carry the open supply Xen hypervisor to RISC-V.

And in 2023 we are able to report that effort is transferring … slowly.

A February 7 post from Oleksii Kurochko, a hypervisor and kernel software program engineer at Vates – the group that created the XCP-ng reduce of Xen – explains that the trouble has taken a couple of steps ahead and some steps again.

Kurochko defined that some latest patches to Xen have been promising – but in addition too complicated to combine simply.

“It was determined to begin committing and remodeling some patches step-by-step,” he wrote.

Up to now, a patch permitting minimal Xen implementations on RISC-V has been merged, as has a cross-build test.

Additionally on Kurochko’s to-do record:

  • Introducing a smoke take a look at and job to confirm early printk performance;
  • Primary entice dealing with;
  • Updating the smoke take a look at to confirm the performance from asm/bug.h;
  • Making some components of Xen generic throughout x86, Arm and RISC-V;
  • Primary MMU help (which he thinks is the following merchandise he’ll handle);
  • Numerous different bits of performance, one by one – smp help, console, allow xen/frequent, and so on.

Kurochko excitedly added that creating Xen for RISC-V is non-trivial, however rated his work “an excellent demonstration that porting Xen to RISC-V might additionally assist to make the Xen code base higher and extra generic. Even when it is extra work within the quick time period, it is higher for the challenge on the long term!”

“Work on porting remains to be in progress (I am working full time on it), and it is from being executed,” he concluded. “Nevertheless, there’s plenty of momentum occurring with our work on RISC-V+Xen, as there may be important help and curiosity from the Xen neighborhood itself and even past!” ®


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