The Xen Project will release nine patches on Thursday.

The Project gives each bug an “XSA” number and the 29th of October will see XSA 145 through 153 debut.

The patch run looks to be a tricky one, because the Project added XSA 143 and 144 to the list, but now lists them as unassigned. If you take a look at the outfit's vuln list, that's not happened before. The list has also grown in recent days: five patches were first listed.

We don't know what the patches are for, because the Xen Project's embargo rules mean that when it finds a nasty it keeps it secret for a while so that “significant distributors and operators of Xen … can prepare patched software in advance.”

That's a polite way of saying lots of big clouds like AWS use Xen, and it is a thoroughly bad idea for bugs to be made public before it and others like it can put patches in place.

For the rest of us, it means Thursday (US time) can safely be devoted to Xen and the art of hypervisor maintenance. ®