XEN 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), together with Samsung, has recently begun work on porting its open para-virtualization hypervisor to ARM v5 and v7 architecture.

Samsung’s participation in this project is no coincidence, 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 dealing with Xen porting issues since 2008 .

I note that in this case we are talking about porting Xen specifically to the "traditional", "mobile" ARM processors, and not to the processors of the special, "server" ARM v8 architecture announced at the end of 2011about which I also recently wrote a note.
With the latter, much will be partly easier, since this architecture supports full-fledged hardware virtualization, similar to Intel VT.

In part, the presence of such a hypervisor will help to use devices on these processors as host systems for “client hypervisors” (such as Citrix XenClient ), but it will be even more interesting for the servers of the NVIDIA Denver project , and for other ways to use mass mobile, low-power ARM processors for server purposes .

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

It is expected that this branch will be included in the mainline this year, which indirectly indicates significant progress and success in this direction.