Xen Project quietly announced five years of support for all releases

The Xen Project has decided to support all releases of its flagship hypervisor for five years, and one of the first beneficiaries of the change is Citrix, which has delivered a preview of XenServer 9 – the release that will take the product back into the mainstream virtualization market.

We’re a bit late with this news because the sources buried it in obscure places.

The Xen Project’s announcement appeared on the xen-devel mailing list, a forum in which developers discuss deeply technical matters. It took six days before a project participant cross-posted it to xen-announce, the list for announcements.

Enough of our griping: The announcement states that the project’s Committers and Core Maintainers decided to update the Xen Project stable branch support policy “to better align with common industry expectations for long-term security maintenance.”

The project previously provided around 1.5 years of full support for new releases ...