vkernel & GSoC, some questions

[Kip Macy]

On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 8:06 PM, Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On 16/03/2008, Robert Watson <rwatson at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
>  > Another avenue to consider is the Linux KVM virtualization technology, which
>  >  is seeing a high level of interest in the Linux community and sounds
>  >  increasingly mature and well-exercised.  It would also offer interesting
>  >  migration benefits for Linux users wanting to try FreeBSD, allowing them to
>  >  trivially create new FreeBSD installs under their existing Linux install.  We
>  >  had an SoC project last year but I'm not sure what the outcome was; it would
>  >  be useful to give Fabio a ping and see how things are going.  Obviously,
>  >  anyone doing this project would need to manage the license issues involved
>  >  carefully.
>
>  Wasn't part of the original KVM idea to support a "hypervisor"
>  interface to a parent, sort of Xen-like, providing interrupt, VM and
>  inter-VM "IPC" hooks?
>
>  I remember seeing this stuff a while back but for some reason all I
>  read about KVM - outside of what Redhat are doing with it and Xen now
>  - focuses on hardware virtualisation.
>
>  A BSD-licenced KVM hypervisor + FreeBSD kernel might be an interesting
>  project. I'm pretty sure Rusty wrote a very very lightweight KVM
>  hypervisor as a demonstration which may serve as a starting point for
>  things.


Nope. It is called lguest, is GPL, IBM has the rights to it and has no
interest in changing the license.

Using KVM for architectural ideas while starting from a fresh codebase
is really the only way to go if you are concerned with licensing.

 -Kip