Xen Project Hypervisor update comes with enhanced ARM support

As companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft increasingly become the pay-to-play providers of public-cloud infrastructure for the world, they need new technologies to lower costs and operate more efficiently. One such technology arrived today. Last year engineers from many companies and universities succeeded in getting the open-source Xen hypervisor software to run on low-power server chips based on designs from the company ARM. As a result, they could run many virtual machines — essentially, many applications — from a single ARM-based server. Now the engineers have outdone themselves. Today the Xen Project, a Linux Foundation group behind the Xen hypervisor, released version 4.4 of the software, which contains multiple performance updates and some important features. And the technology could become implemented soon.