[ANNOUNCE] Jailhouse 0.6 released

[ANNOUNCE] Jailhouse 0.6 released

[Jan Kiszka]

Busily fixing and enhancing the partitioning hypervisor Jailhouse over
the last year, we basically forgot to release new versions. Here is one,
and it's another major step forward towards the production-grade of this
hypervisor.

Key changes since the last release:
 - Rework and maturing of ARMv7 support
 - Integration of ARMv8 support with a many new boards
   - AMD Seattle / SoftIron Overdrive 3000
   - LeMaker HiKey
   - NVIDIA Jetson TX1
   - Xilinx ZCU102 (ZynqMP evaluation board)
 - Support for booting multiple Linux instances, UP or SMP, on all
   supported architectures
 - Enhanced inter-cell communication, including support for using a
   virtual network protocol driver on top, also on all architectures
 - Many improvements on x86
   - AMD IOMMU support (interrupt remapping will come soon)
   - Intel Cache Allocation Technology (L3, support for L2 will follow)
   - Support for recent Intel CPUs, including Apollo Lake SOCs
 - Support for sub-page MMIO regions (who still designs hardware with
   unaligned resources?)

The statistics over v0.5..v0.6 also look fairly nice:
 - 744 commits (330 files changed, 20700 insertions, 9266 deletions)
 - 26 contributors
 - at least 12 different contributing organizations (companies,
   universities)

Special thanks go to Huawei, who did a great job in enabling Jailhouse
on ARMv8, and to the OTH Regensburg, who is currently sending us the
most active non-Siemens contributor, Ralf Ramsauer, and also makes sure
that Jailhouse will literally fly (more at ELC and the Embedded World
conference).


You can download the new release from

    https://github.com/siemens/jailhouse/archive/v0.6.tar.gz

then follow the README.md for first steps on recommended evaluation
platforms and check the tutorial session from last ELC-E [1][2]. Drop us
a note on the mailing list if you run into trouble. Jailhouse continues
to improve on usability, but dealing with real hardware bears the risk
that something requires fine-tuning and deeper understanding.


What comes next? Of course, that also depends on further contributions.
But we do have a number of hot topics on the to-do list:
 - Further rework of the inter-cell communication device, either
   towards some "ivshmem 2.0" that will be used by others as well
   (specifically QEMU) or defined as a Jailhouse-proprietary solution.
   Discussions to be started soon.
 - Improve code documentation, not only to support the ongoing safety
   certification efforts, but it plays an important role there.
 - On-device test automation: with about 10 targets now and likely
   more in the future, it became fairly unhandy to test manually...

Last but not least, we should do better with regular releasing. The plan
is now to establish a 3-months cadence. So the next release will be in
early April. Feel free to remind us if we should forget that again.

Jan

[1]
https://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/ELCE2016-Jailhouse-Tutorial.pdf
[2] https://youtu.be/7fiJbwmhnRw?list=PLbzoR-pLrL6pRFP6SOywVJWdEHlmQE51q

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