Xen Project gets serious about safety in push to possibly partition robot brains

virtualization

Boeing quietly joins FOSS hypervisor crew, as AMD and Renesas lead new effort to comply with formal standards

The Xen Project, home of the open-source hypervisor, has decided it’s time to get serious about formal safety.

That’s not an admission of security woes, but a push to ensure the hypervisor complies with formal safety standards like IEC-61508, which defines the processes and practices used in software that runs in devices and settings that could conceivably harm humans.

Xen has in recent years emphasized work to make its code more suitable to run in embedded workloads and devices like cars. The project points to the fact that modern vehicles rely on software for tasks as diverse as emergency braking and infotainment systems, and manufacturers’ preference to offer all such services with as few physical computers as possible. Virtualizing workloads in a car means a glitchy navigation app is isolated and can’t impact performance of a critical application like collision avoidance.

 The Xen Project now wants to make its software an even better option in such scenarios by complying with formal safety standards. The Register understands that project members believe many more devices, such as robots, will also need workload isolation, so they want to make sure that Xen becomes hypervisor-of-choice in more scenarios.

The group has therefore created a Safety Committee. Three companies are aboard as founding contributors – AMD, EPAM, and Renesas.

AMD and Renesas are chipmakers who are always on the lookout for new markets. Working with Xen and demonstrating expertise in a safety-certified hypervisor won’t hurt them one bit as they pitch their silicon to manufacturers.

The Xen Project has also created a new membership tier called Premier Plus for organizations pursuing functional safety certifications.

“Safety engineering has traditionally required every organization to recreate much of the same foundational work. We believe open source can change that,” said Cody Zuschlag, community manager at Xen Project. “By maintaining shared engineering evidence alongside the software itself, the Xen community can reduce duplicated effort, accelerate certification programs, and make functional safety more practical for industries building the next generation of software-defined systems.”

Boeing recently joined the project, and The Reg understands one reason the aerospace giant signed up was its interest in Xen's safety work.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for the Xen Project, which in early August delivered an update to its flagship hypervisor. It wasn’t a major release but did add support for AMD Zen 5 Bus Lock Threshold, which makes it easier to ensure one guest VM doesn’t make it harder for other workloads to access CPU resources. The release also improved Arm support, and advanced work towards a fully functional release for RISC-V processors. ®