Hi all,

We are very pleased to announce Version 2.1 release of ACRN. You can see the release blog from https://projectacrn.org/blog/ and detailed Release Notes in website https://projectacrn.github.io/latest/release_notes/release_notes_2.1.html

What’s New in v2.1

·       Preempt-RT Linux has been validated as a pre-launched realtime VM. See Pre-Launched Preempt-RT Linux Mode in ACRN for more details.

·       A Trusted Platform Module (TPM) MMIO device can be passthroughed to a pre-launched VM (with some limitations discussed in MMIO Device Passthrough). Previously passthrough was only supported for PCI devices.

·       Open Virtual Machine Firmware (OVMF) now uses a Local Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (LAPIC) timer as its local time instead of the High Precision Event Timer (HPET). This provides the working timer service for the realtime virtual machine (RTVM) booting process.

·       Grub is the recommended bootloader for ACRN. For more information, see Using GRUB to boot ACRN.

See the v2.1 full release notes and documentation for more information about this release including fixed and known issues.

Improvements, updates, and corrections have been made throughout our documentation as well, including these documents:

·       Contribution Guidelines

·       RDT Allocation Feature Supported by Hypervisor

·       ACRN Shared Memory Based Inter-VM Communication

·       MMIO Device Passthrough

·       Virtio-net

·       Build ACRN from Source

·       ACRN Configuration Tool

·       Pre-Launched Preempt-RT Linux Mode in ACRN

·       Enable RDT Configuration

·       Getting Started Guide for ACRN hybrid mode

·       Getting Started Guide for ACRN logical partition mode

·       Launch Windows as the Guest VM on ACRN

·       ACRN Installation via Debian Packages

ACRN is a flexible, lightweight reference hypervisor that is built with real-time and safety-criticality in mind. It is optimized to streamline embedded development through an open source platform. Check out What is ACRN introduction for more information. All project ACRN source code is maintained in the https://github.com/projectacrn/acrn-hypervisor repository and includes folders for the ACRN hypervisor, the ACRN device model, tools, and documentation. You can either download this source code as a zip or tar.gz file (see the ACRN v2.1 GitHub release page) or use Git clone and checkout commands:

git clone https://github.com/projectacrn/acrn-hypervisor

cd acrn-hypervisor

git checkout v2.1

The project’s online technical documentation is also tagged to correspond with a specific release: generated v2.1 documents can be found at https://projectacrn.github.io/2.1/. Documentation for the latest under-development branch is found at https://projectacrn.github.io/latest/.

ACRN v2.1 requires Ubuntu 18.04. Follow the instructions in the Getting Started Guide for ACRN Industry Scenario with Ubuntu Service VM to get started with ACRN. We recommend that all developers upgrade to ACRN release v2.1.

Best & Regards

Terry