Xen Team:
TL;DR: We’d like a @nixos.org email to apply for their pre-disclosure list. Everything else has been going smoothly, and we’re collaborating with upstream to get NixOS featured on their website. We will continue developing Xen on NixOS 25.05 and above.
Details:
Current Status
The Xen Project Hypervisor has been fixed up in Nixpkgs during the second half of this year, making this team the fourth youngest team in Nixpkgs at this point. We’ve been successful in booting a Xen-capable NixOS installation in x86 systems, and have diligently patched every security issue reported by upstream.
Since our announcement in Discourse, everything has been going well, to the point where upstream Xen has approached us for a collaboration in a marketing endeavour, where NixOS will be featured in the Xen Project’s new website in a few months from now. This collaboration has been orchestrated with the Marketing Team, and no further action is needed for it.
Our main blocker lies in our ability to respond to security advisories issued by upstream. While we have taken no longer than a day to patch security issues thus far, we recognise that joining Xen’s security pre-disclosure list would further improve our reaction time to security issues. More information on that blocker is listed under Blockers or Challenges.
Blockers or Challenges
As mentioned in Current Status, we would like to apply for Xen’s security pre-disclosure list so we can be ready when security issues are discovered and get them to users as soon as possible. Unlike the distros list, we have already been informally invited by upstream to apply to their list, and I have made all of the necessary preparations for our initial application. To go ahead with this plan, we will need:
- An e-mail alias that ends in
@nixos.org; - Approval from the Steering Committee.
Everything else (The PGP key, the application message, and the website team page update) has been prepared and awaits a review from the Committee. We only need an official NixOS address, which the Infrastructure team will be able to help us with.
Upcoming Topics or Projects
We don’t expect to need direct intervention from the Steering Committee in our immediate technical projects. That said, Yaroslav has been working on a collaboration with Qubes OS; in the future, that may require the Committee’s attention, but there are no actionable requests yet.
People
The Xen team is comprised of myself, Yaroslav and Hongbo. Emily has been instrumental in reviewing and merging our PRs as well.
To resolve the security blocker mentioned above, we will also need help from the Infrastructure team.
Budget
We have no direct expenditures, so we do not need a budget at this time. There may be monetary concerns with providing the aforementioned e-mail alias, however. (I’m not sure how full the alias list is.)