Welcome Xen as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project

Today we’d like to welcome Xen as the newest Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.

The Xen Project is 10 years-old this week, and its contributors have doubled in the last few years. Xen usage continues to grow and today the project is being deployed in public IaaS environments by some of the world’s largest companies. 

Additionally, the Xen Project has adopted mainline kernel development practices and is progressing ever closer to the mainline kernel community. As of Linux kernel version 3.0, Linux can run unmodified as a Xen host or guest

Also about a year ago, the Xen Project’s former host, Citrix, started focusing on formalizing Xen’s governance practices and simultaneously looking for a vendor-neutral home where it could continue to flourish. The Linux Foundation is happy to provide that home. 

Some of you may be wondering: what about KVM or other virtualization solutions in Linux? Does this affect anything?

Virtualization is important to Linux and the open source community and both Xen and KVM are widely accepted by users and developers. The advancement of both benefits developers, users and vendors. The open source model is predicated upon freedom of choice, so supporting a range of open source virtualization platforms and facilitating collaboration across open source communities is a priority for The Linux Foundation. 

We work closely with the KVM developer community and great ecosystem represented by our friends at the Open Virtualization Alliance. For instance, The Linux Foundation manages the logistics each year for the KVM Forum, and this year we’ll be hosting the KVM Technical End User Summit at the Enterprise End User Summit in New York in May in partnership with IBM. It always has been and will continue to be a priority for us to highlight the KVM community’s content at our events and on Linux.com. 

The market has proven there is opportunity for more than one way to enable virtualization in Linux, and both KVM and Xen have their own merits for different use cases. Historically in open source we’ve seen that two independent approaches to a question can yield amazing results, particularly when they are given an opportunity to cross-pollinate. We believe that by supporting both the Xen Project and KVM communities, The Linux Foundation can help advance the state of Linux virtualization for all and most important support and advance Linux for users. 

We invite everyone to join us this evening at the Julia Morgan Ballroom from 6 p.m. – 9 p.m. to wish the Xen Project a happy 10th birthday and toast to the future of Linux virtualization.