XEN is ported to ARMv5 and v7

XEN.org (not to be confused with Citrix, which uses the Xen hypervisor as the basis for its commercial virtualization product) has recently started working with Samsung to port its open para-virtualization hypervisor to the ARM v5 and v7 architecture.

Samsung’s participation in this project is not accidental, yet this company is one of the largest manufacturers of ARM processors of these families, and its support for XEN.org will be very helpful, especially since the company has been working on porting Xen since 2008 .

I note that in this case we are talking about porting Xen to the “traditional”, “mobile” ARM processors, and not to the processors of the special, “server” ARM v8 architecture announced at the end of 2011, about which I also recently wrote a note.
With the latter, much will be somewhat easier, since this architecture supports full hardware virtualization, similar to Intel's VT.
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In part, the presence of such a hypervisor will help to use devices on these processors as a host system for “client hypervisors” (such as Citrix XenClient ), but it will be even more interesting for servers of the NVIDIA Denver project , and for other ways to use mass mobile, low-consuming ARM processors for server purposes .

Given the availability of ARM support in Linux, and future support in new versions of MS Windows, porting the hypervisor to the processors of this architecture can be a very promising idea.

This branch is expected to enter the mainline already this year, which indirectly indicates significant progress and progress in this direction.