The Linux Foundation today announced the release of the Xen Project Hypervisor 4.18 for this open-source hypervisor that serves as an alternative to Linux KVM use.

Xen 4.18 on all Intel systems MSR_ARCH_CAPS is now visible to guests for information on hardware fixes and speculative execution mitigations. There is also support for a number of new features found with Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors such as PKS, VM-Notify, and bus-lock detection. Looking ahead to Intel Granite Rapids processors, AVX512-FP16 is now supported by this hypervisor. There is also a Intel Hardware P-States (HWP) CPUFreq driver added.

Over on the AMD side, there is CPUID_USER_DIS CPUID faulting support for 4th Gen EPYC 8004/9004 series processors. This CPUID faulting feature with the newest AMD EPYC CPUs is used for controlling a PV guest's view of CPUID data.

Xen 4.18 also adds Arm Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) support as a tech preview, various security fixes are in place, and on PowerPC is initial support for the PPC64LE architecture.

More details on the Xen 4.18 hypervisor update via LinuxFoundation.org .