Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Xen
Summary
Xen (pronounced ˈzɛn) is a free and open-source type-1 hypervisor, providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently. It was
originally developed by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and is now being developed by the Linux Foundation with support from Intel, Citrix, Arm Ltd, Huawei, AWS, Alibaba Cloud, AMD, Bitdefender and epam.
The Xen Project community develops and maintains Xen Project as free and open-source software, subject to the requirements of the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2. Xen Project is currently available for the IA-32, x86-64 and ARM instruction sets.
Xen Project runs in a more privileged CPU state than any other software on the machine, except for Firmware.
Responsibilities of the hypervisor include memory management and CPU scheduling of all virtual machines ("domains"), and for launching the most privileged domain ("dom0") - the only virtual machine which by default has direct access to hardware. From the dom0 the hypervisor can be managed and unprivileged domains ("domU") can be launched.
The dom0 domain is typically a version of Linux or BSD. User domains may either be traditional operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows under which privileged instructions are provided by hardware virtualization instructions (if the host processor supports x86 virtualization, e.g., Intel VT-x and AMD-V), or paravirtualized operating systems whereby the operating system is aware that it is running inside a virtual machine, and so makes hypercalls directly, rather than issuing privileged instructions.
Xen Project boots from a bootloader such as GNU GRUB, and then usually loads a paravirtualized host operating system into the host domain (dom0).
Xen originated as a research project at the University of Cambridge led by Ian Pratt, a senior lecturer in the Computer Laboratory, and his PhD student Keir Fraser. The first public release of Xen was made in 2003, with v1.0 following in 2004.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.