We are pleased to announce the release of ACRN™ hypervisor version 3.3.
What’s New in v3.3
In this v3.3 release, we’ve enhanced VM support, control, and monitoring, enabled Celadon as a User VM, and enhanced device-model passthrough.
Generic Main VM Support
The v3.3 release now supports a new scenario called “Main VM”. A Service VM has two characteristics: (1) it is the default owner of physical resources and (2) it can invoke VM management hypercalls. This release adds support to configure a VM with only the physical resource ownership characteristic and calls this a “Main VM”. An example scenario is a pre-launched TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) VM and a main REE (Rich Execution Environment) VM.
Enabling Celadon as a User VM
The ACRN hypervisor now supports Celadon as a User VM OS. Celadon is an open-source project by Intel that provides a reference software stack for Android* on Intel architecture platforms. This lets developers optimize and test Android on Intel-based devices.
Virtual Processor Performance Controls (vHWP)
The v3.3 release provides a virtual HWP feature to a VM so that the VM can check hardware performance ranges and adjust performance levels for performance or power consumption.
Virtual Thermal Monitor and Software Controlled Clock Facilities
The v3.3 release can virtualize processor thermal sensors and controls for thermal management in VMs.
Hypervisor Runtime Core PM
The v3.3 release enhances processor power management in the hypervisor at runtime to reduce power consumption when a core is idle.
Guest S3 Support
The v3.3 release supports suspend-to-RAM of post-launched VMs running with OVMF.
System Performance Optimization – Virtio-blk Multi-Virtqueue Support
This release optimizes the virtio-block backend performance by allowing multiple virtqueues between a frontend driver and the backend.
Notification of VM Events
Emits events (such as RTC changes and power cycles) to the monitor socket for customizing further actions upon such events.
Enhance device model passthrough
This release supports passthrough PCI devices with legacy interrupts, some ACPI devices like GPIO controllers, and legacy UARTs.
ServiceVM supervisor role
You can configure the Service VM with a supervisor role so it can manage the power status of any guest VM.
If you have feedback on these changes or other aspects of ACRN, please share them on the ACRN users mailing list.
See the full v3.3 release notes and documentation for more information about this release, including fixed and known issues.
