Joanna Rutkowska has announced the availability of a new release of Qubes OS, a Fedora based platform which isolates a user's tasks for improved security. The new release, Qubes OS 3.0, includes a number of important improvements over the 2.0 release. Key among the new features are separating Qubes from the underlying hypervisor (which may allow Qubes to use alternative hypervisors in the future), Debian templates and an upgrade from Xen 4.1 to 4.4. "New features since 2.0: HAL (Hypervisor Abstraction Layer) - based on libvirt, opens a whole new possibilities of using different hypervisors. Currently Qubes OS uses Xen. Xen 4.4 - many new features, but for us the most important is much more mature libxl tool stack. Qrexec 3 - greatly improved performance by using direct VM-VM connections and bigger buffers. Debian templates gets official support. Whonix templates. Build system improvements - especially support for distribution-specific plugins (makes supporting multiple distributions much easier) and building templates using DispVM. Automated tests - makes much easier to find bugs, before its even shipped to users."