Xen Summit 2025: how we shaped what's next

Last month, the Xen community gathered at AMD/Xilinx headquarters in San Jose for the Xen Summit 2025, and what an incredible edition it was!
Vates was proud to be a Silver Sponsor of the event, and even prouder to see how strong, diverse, and forward-looking the Xen ecosystem has become.

🧑‍🚀 A strong presence from Vates

With more than ten Vates team members on site, we represented the largest delegation after AMD, who hosted the event.
But we didn’t just show up: we actively contributed: four talks, multiple design sessions, and constant collaboration throughout the summit. It's roughly more than 15% of physical attendees and 20% of the talks!

Xen & XCP-ng in the Datacenter – State of the Union (Olivier)

In this keynote, I shared the current state of the Xen Project in production, how XCP-ng is powering thousands of infrastructures worldwide, and how Vates’ work bridges upstream innovation with real-world deployments. It was also an opportunity to discuss the ongoing VMware exodus, and how the Xen ecosystem can provide a sustainable, open, and sovereign alternative for virtualization.

Xen Toolstack: Past and Future (Anthony)

Anthony provided an insightful retrospective of the Xen toolstack, from XAPI’s early architecture to the new directions being discussed within the community. The session highlighted how Vates engineers are helping shape the next-generation management stack, with improved modularity and security.

Running Linux with AMD SEV on Xen (Teddy)

This highly technical session explored running encrypted Linux guests using AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). The presentation covered the engineering work behind enabling SEV in Xen and demonstrated early results. It's a major milestone for confidential computing on Xen.

Q35 Next Steps (Thierry)

Thierry discussed progress on Q35 emulation, paving the way for better Windows and modern Linux guest compatibility, and preparing the foundations for more advanced hardware features and performance optimization.

🧭 Design Sessions: building the future, together

Beyond talks, the Vates team also led several design sessions, each of them highly constructive and collaborative:

• Xen & Secure Boot: Strengthening the boot chain trust, improving verification mechanisms for both hypervisor and Dom0.
• New Toolstack Architecture: Brainstorming the modular evolution of Xen’s management stack.
• Improved TSC Handling: Proposals to enhance timekeeping precision and synchronization across VMs despite live migrations and different CPU generations.
• Tapdisk Evolution: Discussing improvements for the block I/O backend to achieve higher throughput and resilience.

All sessions were dynamic, technical, and solution-driven: it's another demonstration of a healthy, forward-moving community.

And since the Xen community is such a tight-knit group, our team naturally took part in almost every other design session as well, contributing ideas and feedback wherever it mattered.

💪 Strengthening the Xen community itself

The Xen Summit was also an opportunity to recognize the outstanding work by the Linux Foundation and particularly Cody, who joined as Xen Community Manager six months ago, sponsored by Vates.
His efforts have already made a real difference in coordination, documentation, and communication across the project.

And we’re not stopping there: we’re planning to sponsor a DevRel specialist to further enhance community engagement and improve developer experience around Xen.
This reflects our belief that sustaining an open-source project means supporting not only the code, but also the people and processes that make it thrive.

💥 Our upstream impact keeps growing

With the Xen 4.20 release, Vates officially entered the Top 4 contributors by commits, and 5th in review activity.
Our engineer Oleksii ranks as the 4th individual contributor, showing the scale of our upstream involvement. He’s also been serving as the official Xen Release Manager for the past two releases, and will proudly continue in that role for the next one.

And this doesn’t even account for the many projects outside the Xen repository, such as our Rust reimplementation of Xen tools, where Vates is by far the main contributor.
We’re investing heavily not only in features, but in the long-term structure and vitality of the ecosystem: from maintainers to community management, from communication to event organization.

🍕 Our own Xen Summit stream party

Meanwhile, for those at Vates who couldn’t make the trip to San Jose, we hosted a stream party at our Grenoble offices. It was the perfect excuse for our teams (usually spread across Europe) to meet in person, share ideas, and enjoy the summit together. And obviously, with good food, great talks and great company!

🤩 See you at the next Xen Meetup!

Following this great momentum, we’re thrilled to announce that the next Xen Meetup will take place again in Grenoble (France), around April 2026. A good opportunity to rename it Xen Spring Meetup maybe? (instead of Winter last time, in January).
Expect the same collaborative, technical, and friendly format as last time! More details coming soon.

At Vates, we’re proud to play a major role in keeping the project vibrant and growing, with a mix of engineering excellence, open collaboration, and community building.

We can’t wait to see what we’ll achieve together in 2026.