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

The Xen Project, a hub for the publicly available hypervisor, has made a decision to take formal safety seriously. This is not a sign of security concerns, but a proactive move to ensure compliance with safety standards like IEC-61508. This standard outlines practices for software running in devices or settings that may impact human safety.

In recent times, Xen has focused on making its code more suitable for embedded workloads and devices such as cars. Today's vehicles rely on software for tasks ranging from emergency braking to infotainment systems. By allowing manufacturers to offer all these services using fewer physical computers, virtualization of workloads in a car ensures that a malfunctioning navigation app does not affect the performance of critical applications like collision avoidance.

The Xen Project hopes to make its software even more attractive for such scenarios by adhering to formal safety standards. They believe many more devices, including robots, may also require workload isolation, and thus, they have established a Safety Committee. AMD, EPAM, and Renesas are the founding contributors to this committee.

AMD and Renesas are chipmakers who are always on the lookout for new markets. Their expertise in safety-certified hypervisors will be beneficial as they pitch their silicon to manufacturers. The Xen Project has also introduced 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," 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 it is believed that the aerospace giant's interest in Xen's safety work was one of the reasons for its membership.

In early August, the Xen Project delivered an update to its flagship hypervisor. This release added support for AMD Zen 5 Bus Lock Threshold, which helps ensure that one guest VM does not hinder other workloads from accessing CPU resources. The update also improved Arm support and advanced work towards a fully functional release for RISC-V processors.