Port proposal - VSTools acceleration driver for Virtual Iron

[Simon Kinsella]

Hi

I'm currently liaising with a company that offers 'cloud' style scalable virtual server hosting for Linux based on their Virtual Iron infrastructure. As a committed FreeBSD user/fan and potential customer, I'm working with them to trial and introduce FreeBSD 7 to their list of supported OSes.

As it stands, I am told that FreeBSD does seem to run as a guest OS under Virtual Iron (which is based on Xen), but some performance and VI features are lost because there's no version of the VSTools accelerated Linux driver set for FreeBSD, making it something of a second-class citizen to the ubiquitous Linux offerings.

So I'm thinking:

0) It would seem to be increasingly important that FreeBSD doesn't get left by the wayside as virtualistaion becomes more common.
1) Is there any known initiative/project out there already looking into porting vstools?
2) Are there known technical barriers to doing this? Apparently only a handful of Linux distros themselves are supported out of the box.
3) Is anyone interested? :)

FWIW, VSTools is GPL and readily obtainable, along with Open Virtual Iron: http://www.virtualiron.com/Support/Downloads/Open-Virtual-Iron/index.php

I toyed with taking it on myself but it looks quite hairy and I don't have either the hardware nor any practical experience of FreeBSD/Linux driver development or internals!

Thoughts?

/Simon

--
Simon Kinsella 
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