Xen stuff

[Doug Rabson]

On 3 Dec 2008, at 19:27, Alexandre Sunny Kovalenko wrote:

>
> On Mon, 2008-12-01 at 21:54 +0000, Doug Rabson wrote:
>> On 1 Dec 2008, at 18:45, Ivan Voras wrote:
>>
>>> 2008/12/1 Doug Rabson <dfr at rabson.org>:
>>>> I will be working on improving Xen support in FreeBSD for the new  
>>>> few
>>>
>>> Great!
>>>
>>>> months. My main goal is to add support for native Xen drivers to an
>>>> amd64
>>>> kernel which is running in Xen's HVM mode. These drivers will take
>>>> over from
>>>> the slow emulated devices and provide most of the performance
>>>> benefits of a
>>>> paravirtualised kernel. I'm initially going to be supporting
>>>> FreeBSD 6.x but
>>>> I will port it all forward to head and 7.x when it works properly.
>>>
>>> For the not-quite-yet-initiated : does this mean you're working on
>>> paravirtualized drivers for Xen dom-U ("guest" case)?
>>
>> Sort of. The latest versions of Xen support something called HVM mode
>> which allows it to boot a completely unmodified guest OS using
>> emulated devices in a similar way to e.g. VMware Fusion. It is then
>> possible to incrementally add Xen-aware paravirtualised drivers which
>> can replace the emulated ones and which perform better. This is how
>> they support Windows under Xen.
> Did you get to run FreeBSD in HVM mode? What version of Xen, and who  
> was
> playing the dom0?
>
> The reason for the question is that I have patchy experience with HVM:
> while I have Windows XP Professional running happily, OpenSolaris  
> 2008.5
> would lock up on the regular basis.
>
> I am running Xen 3.2.1 with OpenSuse x86_64 11.0 in the dom0.

I'm running XenServer 5.0 which is (I think) running a linux-2.6.18  
kernel with roughly xen-3.2.2.