Testing Luvalley with FreeBSD as dom0

[Xiaodong Yi]

Hi, dear all,

First, I would like to thank Juergen for his long-time hard work on
porting and testing Luvalley/Qemu stuff to let it run with FreeBSD.

As said by Juergen, Luvalley is designed to enable arbitrary operating
system to utilize the hardware virtualization extensions to host
virtual machines as pure userland applications. That is to say, in
theory, Luvalley may run arbitrary OS as the so-called dom0 OS and
then host multiple guests/domU OSs on top of it. Luvalley neither
modify OS kernels, nor insert modules into the OS kernel. The
virtualized guests/domU OSs are executed as userland applications by
the modified Qemu.

I am very glad that Juergen introduced Luvalley to the FreeBSD
society. We hope you like the idea of it. And we will be much more
pleased for the feedbacks. Luvally now is only experimental and may be
not stable or low performance. But I will continue working to improve
it.

Best regards,

Xiaodong Yi

2010/4/19 Juergen Lock <nox at jelal.kn-bremen.de>:
> Hi!
>
>  I had been watching the Luvalley project for a while,
>
>        http://sourceforge.net/projects/luvalley/files/
>        http://sunet.dl.sourceforge.net/project/luvalley/luvalley/luvalley-7/README
>        http://www.mail-archive.com/kvm@vger.kernel.org/msg11896.html
>
> and a few weeks ago I was able to run Linux and FreeBSD domU.s on a
> Linux dom0 on my box for the first time, and then I ported a version
> of qemu-kvm 0.12.3 that Xiaodong Yi (Luvalley author) had adapted to
> Luvalley to FreeBSD and got that running domU.s with FreeBSD as dom0 too. :)
>
>  At the moment Luvalley still has major issues and is far from being
> production-ready yet, but for FreeBSD users who want have a look for
> themselves I've now made an experimental port of the mentioned
> qemu-kvm-luvalley 0.12.3:
>
>        http://people.freebsd.org/~nox/qemu/luvalley/qemu-kvm-luvalley-0.12.3.shar
>
>  If you want to test it without deinstalling a qemu port you can build
> the port with DISABLE_CONFLICTS=yes and run the Luvalley qemu-kvm from
> within the build dir:
>
>        work/qemu-kvm-0.12.3/x86_64-softmmu/qemu-system-x86_64 ...
> resp.
>        work/qemu-kvm-0.12.3/i386-softmmu/qemu ...
>
>  And before I forget, your cpu needs to be amd64/x86_64/em64t (i.e.,
> able to run 64 bit) and it needs to have Intel VT or AMD-V aka vmx or svm.
> I only tested amd64 dom0s (Linux and FreeBSD stable/8), but afaik i386
> dom0s are supported as well.  And this is still experimental code, it
> may crash, eat your dog, whatever...
>
>  Here is the pkg-descr:
>
> Luvalley is a lightweight type-1 Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) with
> novel architecture, to enable any OS to run virtual machines by utilizing
> hardware virtualization extensions such as Intel VT and AMD-V.
>
> This is an experimental port of qemu-kvm adapted to Luvalley by
> Xiaodong Yi (Luvalley author - files/patch-luvalley) and preliminary
> patched for FreeBSD my me (nox, files/patch-z-kvm-bsd) so that FreeBSD
> can run domU (guests) using Luvalley.  Luvalley still has many limitations
> and is definitely far from being production-ready, but it already seems
> to be able to run domUs partway faster than kqemu with -kernel-kqemu. :)
> (and also works better than kqemu for amd64 domUs.)
>
> Note:  You need grub to boot the Luvalley `kernel',
>
>        http://sourceforge.net/projects/luvalley/files/luvalley/luvalley-7/luvalley/download
>
> which (hopefully) will then boot the first disk again from which you
> _then_ select the FreeBSD slice for booting the FreeBSD loader and
> kernel to run as Luvalley dom0 if you want to test this port.  More info
> is here:
>
>        http://sunet.dl.sourceforge.net/project/luvalley/luvalley/luvalley-7/README
>
> Since FreeBSD users rarely have a grub installed I've made a grub iso
> with a menu.lst configured to boot the Luvalley `kernel' from /boot/luvally
> on the root of the first FreeBSD slice on the first disk (if your FreeBSD
> install is elsewhere you have to either edit the grub menu entry on the fly
> using grub's `e'dit command or unpack the iso using e.g. bsdtar, edit the
> menu.lst, and then make a new iso, see the README.txt within the iso.)
>
>        http://people.freebsd.org/~nox/qemu/luvalley/grub-luvalley.iso
>
> If you have a working serial port (`COM1' aka /dev/tty[du]0) you can try
> to catch Luvalley's debug messages (115200bps, 8N1), this is especially
> useful should Luvally crash, otherwise there's probably no chance to
> fix the bug.  One known crash at the moment happens when Luvalley runs
> out of ioctl object slots of which by default there are only 32
> ("IOCTL_SIZE" in the Luvalley source, I haven't tried to build that on
> FreeBSD yet) and atm they never get released so in practice for the moment
> you should reboot your dom0 (FreeBSD) after running a few domUs to avoid
> that crash.  Another known problem is atm when a domU shuts down the
> luvally qemu will hang and you have to manually kill it.
>
> WWW: http://sourceforge.net/projects/luvalley/files/
>