As AMD advances efforts to safety-certify the upstream Xen hypervisor, this presentation provides an update on the past year's progress and roadmap. Xen, a type-1 hypervisor with a self-contained codebase, continues to gain traction in automotive and industrial applications due to its robust isolation, security, and virtualization capabilities.
A central theme this year is reducing the certifiable code footprint through changes we intend to upstream in the near future. We apply several dead-code-elimination techniques, such as gating management hypercalls (`MGMT_HYPERCALLS`), adding AMD restricted-feature configurations (`AMD_RESTRICTED_*`), and enabling linker garbage collection of unused sections.
Alongside the code, we have formalized Xen's domain-facing behavior into requirements and architecture specification, both of which we plan to upstream as a shared, verifiable baseline for the community.
On verification, we will share tests spanning domain-based tests, a self-test framework, GDB fault-injection test framework, and QEMU qtest-based cases. Finally, we present the current structural coverage on Arm64 and x86_64, along with our roadmap to close the remaining gaps.
