FreeBSD Xen domU ?

[K. Macy]

On Dec 1, 2009, at 8:35 AM, Josh Carter wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> On Dec 1, 2009, at 4:37 AM, Luke Marsden wrote:
> 
>> Thanks for your reply. I'll see what I can do about getting the precise
>> version (which I believe is indeed 3.0.3) and patches for you. Amazon say on
>> http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ that "we work with our partners and community to
>> provide you with the most choice possible. You are also empowered to use our
>> bundling tools to upload your own operating systems"... so I'll attempt to
>> hold them to that :)
> 
> I've been in contact with Jeff Barr at Amazon over the past couple months and he's trying to put me in contact with an "appropriate technical resource" to support FreeBSD efforts toward a EC2-compatible system.
> 
> Right now my company has a full-time expert working on FreeBSD on Xen, but our focus is initially IO performance. We're running 64-bit HVM with PV drivers. Given that Amazon runs Windows on EC2 they should have the ability to run HVM, but the preferable solution is PV. I don't know when PV will become a priority for somebody; for us (and some others I know) it wouldn't matter until IO runs a lot faster.
> 
> In any case, help from Amazon would be welcome. There are a number of companies interested in FreeBSD on Xen in various configurations, and efforts from any party benefit everyone else.


Scott Long re-wrote blkfront, I have since updated the copyright and merged it in to HEAD. There is an extension to busdma that you may need, depending on file system consumer. It doesn't perform much better on random I/O due to design issues with blkback. We've debated re-writing linux's blkback  versus simply moving all I/O to a driver domain and letting freebsd take care of it.


-Kip