The Xen Hypervisor was built for the Cloud from the outset: when Xen was designed, we anticipated a world, which today is known as cloud computing. Today, Xen powers the largest clouds in production.

Xen originally pioneered the use of paravirtualisation (PV) in order to get the most out of contemporary hardware. Since then hardware vendors, including Intel & AMD in the X86 space and more recently ARM, have introduced hardware extensions which help to solve some of the hard virtualisation problems and which can bring some benefits over pure paravirtualisation and pure hardware virtualization.

This talk explores the direction paravirtualisation is taking in order to make effective use of the features which hardware now provides while still providing the security and scalability advantages of the PV approach. The talk will briefly introduce the evolution of virtualization techniques used in Xen and then introduce Xen's new approach to virtualization as used by PVH and in Xen's ARM port, both of which will be features in the upcoming Xen 4.3 release.