We are pleased to announce the release of ACRN™ hypervisor version 3.1.
What’s New in v3.1
Release v3.0 featured a new ACRN Configurator UI tool with a more intuitive design and workflow that simplifies getting the setup for the ACRN hypervisor right. With this v3.1 release, we’ve continued making improvements to the Configurator including more comprehensive error checking with more developer-friendly messages. You’ll also see additional advanced configuration settings for tuning real-time performance including Cache Allocation Technology (CAT) and vCPU affinity. Read more in the ACRN Configurator Tool and Scenario Configuration Options documents.
If you have feedback on this, or other aspects of ACRN, please share them on the ACRN users mailing list.
As with the v3.0 release, we’ve simplified installation of the Configurator by providing a Debian package that you can download from the ACRN v3.1 tag assets and install. See the Getting Started Guide for more information.
Improved Board Inspector Collection and Reporting
You run the ACRN Board Inspector tool to collect information about your target system’s processors, memory, devices, and more. The generated board XML file is used by the ACRN Configurator to determine which ACRN configuration options are possible, as well as possible values for target system resources. The v3.1 Board Inspector has improved scanning and provides more messages about potential issues or limitations of your target system that could impact ACRN configuration options.
The Board Inspector is updated to probe beyond CPUID information for Cache Allocation Technology (CAT) support and also detects availability of L3 CAT by accessing the CAT MSRs directly. Read more in Board Inspector Tool.
Sample Application with Two Post-Launched VMs
With this v3.1 release, we provide a follow-on Sample Application User Guide to the Getting Started Guide. This sample application shows how to create two VMs that are launched on your target system running ACRN. One VM is a real-time VM running cyclictest, an open-source application commonly used to measure latencies in real-time systems. This real-time VM (RT_VM) uses inter-VM shared memory (IVSHMEM) to send data to a second Human-Machine Interface VM (HMI_VM) that formats and presents the collected data as a histogram on a web page shown by a browser. This guide shows how to configure, create, and launch the two VM images that make up this application. Full code for the sample application is provided in the acrn-hypervisor GitHub repo misc/sample_application.
Multiple-Displays Support for VMs
The virtio-gpu mechanism is enhanced to support VMs with multiple displays.
Improved TSC Frequency Reporting
The hypervisor now reports Time Stamp Counter (TSC) frequency in KHz so that VMs can get that number without calibrating to a high precision timer.
See the full v3.1 release notes and documentation for more information about this release, including fixed and known issues.
