Collaboration Summit 2015

Recent vulnerabilities like Heartbleed and Shellshock have brought attention to the place security of open-source software plays in our critical infrastructure. When vulnerabilities are discovered, project response can have a major impact on how much risk end users are exposed to.

The Xen Project is a critical component in the cloud, and as a result we have been developing our security response process for several years. This talk will explore the principles behind our process, as well as some of the pain points we have experienced along the way, to help other projects and users understand the potential issues involved. It will include the various approaches, from full disclosure to pre-disclosure (and who to pre-disclose to); "public" and "private" vulnerabilities, community trust issues, and a number of issues we wouldn't have expected.

The 4.5 release no a minor "point" update: it is one of the most feature-rich releases in the project's history. It contains several important additions. Most notably, new Xen PVH virtualization mode now supports running as dom0, enhanced support for Remus, significant ARM architecture updates, security improvements, real-time scheduling, support for Intel Cache Monitoring Technology (CMT), as well as improvements for automotive and embedded use-cases. Other enhancements include additional support for FreeBSD, systemd support, additional libvirt support, the release of Mirage OS 2.0, and more.

Besides giving an overview of Xen 4.5, we will explain the project's roadmap process and share what's ahead for 2015: such as improved OpenStack integration and hotpatching (applying security fixes without the need to reboot).

ARM-powered servers for cloud computing and data center servers took a big step forward when Cavium recently announced availability of the industry’s first 48-core family of ARMv8 workload optimized processors.

Delivering the highest core counts and most comprehensive set of I/O and accelerators in the market, ThunderX-based solutions are fully optimized for a targeted set of highly scalable workloads. In his talk, Larry Wikelius, who spearheads ecosystems and partner enablement for Cavium, will discuss growing momentum for ARMv8-based servers for hyperscale data center, cloud servers, big data and scale out computing as well as share new performance benchmark data. In addition, developments in the networking and carrier space are quickly mobilizing behind programs like The Open NFV Organization. The Linux Foundation, Xen Project, Open Compute Project and Linaro are also key.