Xen Project Launches Shared Functional Initiative for Safety-Critical Systems

The Xen Safety Committee gives organizations a collaborative path to develop and maintain reusable engineering artifacts for functional safety certification

Summary

• The Xen Project, an open source virtualization platform hosted by the Linux Foundation, today announced the Xen Safety Committee, a collaborative initiative for developing and maintaining reusable engineering artifacts that organizations can use to support their own functional safety certification programs.
• The initiative enables shared development and maintenance of reusable engineering artifacts, reducing costs, avoiding duplicated effort, and accelerating downstream safety certification for open source systems.
• Xen releases now receive five years of security coverage – including three years of regular support—giving integrators a more predictable foundation for long-lived development, certification, and deployment programs.
• These efforts expand Xen's deployment across safety-critical software-defined environments, including automotive, avionics, industrial automation and robotics.

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 17, 2026 – The Xen Project, an open source virtualization platform hosted by the Linux Foundation, today announced the Xen Safety Committee, a collaborative initiative for developing and maintaining shared engineering artifacts that support functional safety activities and expand Xen’s role across automotive, industrial automation, avionics, robotics, and other safety-critical systems. As industries adopt software-defined architectures for products that must meet rigorous safety requirements, the need for trusted, collaboratively maintained engineering practices has grown. The Xen Safety Committee provides a neutral place for organizations to develop and maintain those shared foundations together.

Beyond maintaining source code, the committee is responsible for collaboratively developing and maintaining engineering artifacts intended to support organizations’ downstream functional safety certification. Founding contributors AMD, EPAM, and Renesas have already developed an extensive set of software safety requirements, architecture specifications, MISRA-related engineering, DFMEA analysis, testing frameworks, tooling, code coverage, and process documentation that will serve as the initiative's initial foundation. By pairing dedicated safety governance with Xen’s established upstream development model, the initiative brings safety expertise into the project while preserving the community-led review and maintainership processes that govern changes to the hypervisor.

The initiative builds on the Xen Project’s commitment to long-term platform maintenance. In 2026, the project extended the support lifecycle for Xen releases to five years, including three years of regular support followed by two additional years of security support. This longer lifecycle gives integrators a more predictable foundation for maintaining Xen-based products in industries with extended development, certification, and deployment timelines.

The project also announced Premier Plus, a new membership tier for organizations pursuing functional safety certification. Premier Plus members help fund, develop, and maintain Xen’s safety program, appoint voting representatives to both the Xen Project Advisory Board and Safety Committee, and gain access to committee-managed engineering artifacts and working materials. Members also help establish priorities and roadmap direction and can use the maintained engineering foundations with qualified safety assessors to reduce duplicated effort and accelerate downstream certification programs.

“Safety engineering has traditionally required every organization to recreate much of the same foundational work. We believe open source can change that,” said Cody Zuschlag, community manager at Xen Project. “By maintaining shared engineering evidence alongside the software itself, the Xen community can reduce duplicated effort, accelerate certification programs, and make functional safety more practical for industries building the next generation of software-defined systems.”

The Xen Safety Committee represents the next phase of the Xen Project’s evolution, building on Xen’s actively maintained, multi-architecture virtualization platform, including its support for x86 and Arm, strong isolation and partitioning capabilities, MISRA C compliance work, and static analysis. Together, these foundations support mixed-criticality systems in which workloads with different safety, security, and performance requirements share computing hardware, strengthening Xen’s role across automotive, avionics, industrial automation, robotics, and other safety-critical environments.

Organizations interested in participating in the Xen Safety Committee or learning more about Premier Plus membership are encouraged to visit XenProject.org/technology/safety/.

Supporting Quotes

"AMD is a pioneer of functional safety certifications for open source software, and we are proud to help lead the effort to make Xen the safe, open source, certifiable hypervisor of choice for safety-critical industries. Together with the Xen community, we are paving the way for open source software and the highest standards of safety to go hand in hand."

– Christopher Hatch, Product Applications Engineering, Embedded Software Marketing, AMD

“Xen is a critical component of the AGL SoDeV Software Defined Vehicle platform, providing the strong isolation and virtualization capabilities needed to consolidate multiple vehicle functions on shared computing hardware. Security and functional safety are fundamental requirements for the automotive industry, and they must be designed into the platform from the beginning. The Xen Safety Initiative is an important step toward creating shared, reusable engineering artifacts that can reduce duplicated effort, accelerate certification, and give automakers and suppliers greater confidence as they develop the next generation of software-defined vehicles.”

– Dan Cauchy, Executive Director, Automotive Grade Linux

"Achieving baseline functional safety certification for Xen is a critical milestone, but it represents just the beginning of a continuous journey. As the hypervisor evolves and its footprint in mission-critical applications expands, the approach to safety must evolve alongside. Xen’s core strength has always been its open-source community; by applying that same collaborative approach to our FuSa ecosystem - through shared tooling, testing approaches and frameworks, process governance, and comprehensive documentation - we ensure that safety is not a static checkbox, but a living, community-driven foundation for the future of software-defined systems."

– Artem Mygaiev, Technology Solutions Director, EPAM

"As a founding contributor to the Xen Project's Safety Initiative, Renesas is proud to help establish a collaborative framework for developing and maintaining reusable safety artifacts. By working together across the ecosystem, we can accelerate the deployment of safety-conscious virtualization solutions for next-generation automotive platforms and strengthen the industry’s approach to functional safety."

– Aish Dubey, Vice President, Renesas Electronics

"Systems with safety considerations need a trusted hypervisor to provide the foundation for other open source components, such as Zephyr and Linux, to support mixed criticality embedded applications. The Zephyr and Xen projects have been exchanging best practices over the last few years as a pathway to achieve safety certification of open source components. We welcome the Xen Safety Initiative to accelerate the journey of Xen achieving formal certification.”

– Kate Stewart, Vice President, Dependable Embedded Systems, The Linux Foundation

About the Xen Project

The Xen Project, hosted by The Linux Foundation, is an open source hypervisor powering some of the world’s largest cloud platforms, embedded systems, and security applications. Xen’s flexible architecture enables high-performance, secure, and scalable virtualization solutions. The Xen Project community includes major industry contributors, researchers, and developers dedicated to advancing open source virtualization technology. To learn more about the Xen Project, visit https://xenproject.org.

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