Xen PVHVM with FreeBSD10 Guest

[Sydney Meyer]

Hello everyone,

does someone know how to check if the paravirtualized I/O drivers from Xen are loaded/working in FreeBSD 10? To my understanding it isn't necessary anymore to compile a custom kernel with PVHVM enabled, right? In /var/log/messages/ I can see the XN* and XBD* devices and the network performance is very good (saturated Gb) compared to qemu-emulated, but the disk performance is not as well, infact, it is even slower than emulated with qemu (0.10.2). I did some test with dd and bonnie++, turned caching on the host off and tried to directly sync to disk, PVonHVM is averagely 15-20 % slower than QEMU at throughput. Both VM's are running on the same host on a Xen 4.1 Hypervisor with QEMU 0.10.2 on a Debian Linux 3.2 Kernel as Dom0.