Jailhouse 0.1 released

After its publication about 10 months ago, the Jailhouse partitioning hypervisor for Linux [1] reached an important first milestone: all major features required to use Jailhouse on Intel x86 CPUs are now available. We are marking this point with a first release tag, v0.1.

This release particularly means full exploitation of VT-d DMA and interrupt remapping to isolate assigned PCI devices from the hypervisor and foreign cells. Moreover, the usability of Jailhouse was greatly improved by the introduction and continuous extension of a generator for system configuration files. Finally, a framework for writing basic cell applications is available now. With a few lines of C code you can set up timer interrupts, read clocks or configure PCI devices for the use in simple bare-metal real-time applications.

The new release can be downloaded from

https://github.com/siemens/jailhouse/archive/v0.1.tar.gz

It's easiest to try out in a virtual environment provided by QEMU/KVM, see the included README. The braver ones can pick a real compatible machine and let "jailhouse config create" provide a (generally) working configuration. Be warned that real hardware tend to require some manual post-processing of configuration files, for the demo cells or even the system.

Check the project homepage at

https://github.com/siemens/jailhouse

for the git repository, links to the mailing list and further information. Don't hesitate to contact the development community on questions, problems or suggestions.

There is still a bit work ahead to reach a version 1.0. In the near future, we will look into integrating recently published contributions of new architectures like AMD64 [1] and ARM 32-bit [2]. An inter-cell communication mechanism will also be merged soon. Several features particularly important for the use in safety-critical scenarios have been identified and are being developed now.

Enabling Jailhouse as a certifiable component in safety-related systems is our primary goal, though we are not excluding other use case like in telecommunication, high-speed real-time control or scenarios we haven't even thought of yet.

Last but not least: Many thanks to all who contributed code, reviews, comments or sponsoring to the project! Your input was already very valuable for the progress of Jailhouse. Keep it up!

Jan

[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.kvm.devel/116825
[2] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.jailhouse/601
[3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.jailhouse/779

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

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