Jailhouse 0.5 released

"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

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