[ANNOUNCE] Jailhouse 0.5 released

[Jan Kiszka]

"Release often, release early" -- we did quite well on the latter but
there is room for improvements regarding the former. So let's do it:

After its first release 0.1, we are happy to announce the new version
0.5 of the Linux-based partitioning hypervisor Jailhouse. The project
made noteworthy progress over the past months which shall be underlined
with this version number jump. Some highlights of this release:

 - AMD64 support
 - ARMv7 support, running on several boards:
   - Banana Pi
   - NVIDIA Jetson TK1
   - Versatile Express
 - inter-cell communication foundations via ivshmem devices
 - improved isolation on x86
 - support for larger x86 machines

You can download the release from

    https://github.com/siemens/jailhouse/archive/v0.5.tar.gz

then follow the README for first steps on recommended evaluation
platforms. Drop us a note on the mailing list if you run into trouble.
Jailhouse improved also in usability, but dealing with real hardware
still bears the risk that something requires fine-tuning and deeper
understanding.

Beyond this release, there are already several new features in our
incubator. Among them are:

- secure (measured) startup using TPM & Intel TXT [1]
- support for booting multiple Linux instances

While it always looked like that the latter is easier to achieve on ARM,
and there is progress on that right now [2], enabling static Linux
partitions on x86 appeared way more complex. But recent work proved the
concerns wrong: We now have single-core Linux booting in Jailhouse
cells! It is driving assigned PCI devices without any relevant
hypervisor interference [3][4]. Consequently, running cyclictest over a
-rt kernel in a cell gives native latencies. We were also able to host a
simple DPDK workload this way. We even turned off interrupts in the DPDK
cell because the test was only polling - true, 100% CPU occupation.

Thanks to all our contributors for the steady work on Jailhouse, letting
it progress that well. Special credits also go to QEMU/KVM as an
incredibly valuable toolset for development and testing on x86 - hope we
will have this on ARM as well in the near future.

Jan

[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.jailhouse/2692
[2] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.jailhouse/3016
[3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.jailhouse/3032
[4] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.jailhouse/2956

-- 
Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, CT RTC ITP SES-DE
Corporate Competence Center Embedded Linux
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