Xen stuff

[Alexandre "Sunny" Kovalenko]

On Wed, 2008-12-03 at 20:38 +0000, Doug Rabson wrote:
> 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.
> 
Just for the mail archives -- I have installed vanilla 6.4-RELEASE
(amd64) as HVM ("Fully virtualized" in SuSE-speak) guest under OpenSuse
11.0 x86_64/Xen 3.2.1. I have not done much beyond building world with
both UP and SMP kernels. I have seen some 'calcru: negative runtime ...'
and 'calcru: runtime went backwards ...', but otherwise no ill effects
whatsoever.

Machine is Dell OptiFlex 740 with Athlon 64 X2 4200+.

-- 
Alexandre "Sunny" Kovalenko (Олександр Коваленко)