Panics when booting i386 paravirtualized FreeBSD

[Jeroen van der Ham]

Hi,

On 5 Apr 2014, at 11:41, Jonni Nakari <jonni at egarden.fi> wrote:

> The machine is not capable of running HVM virtualized (no VT-x/AMD-V) so I would like to get paravirtualized version of FreeBSD running, but it seems to me that the state of PV FreeBSD is quite bad currently. If I manage to get the DomU running, can I expect it to support multiple processors? Can it handle more than 4 GB of RAM? I read from a previous post to this list that multiprocessor support might be broken, but that message was from over a year ago. Also the maximum RAM support support comes from an old source. Ideally I would like the FreeBSD DomU to serve ZVOLs and NFS to other DomUs.

Whether or not you can run HVM does not depend on the CPU, but on XEN and which loader you use (e.g. qemuloader). So the best thing you can do is actually to run a HVM machine and use the stock kernel. That automatically detects which PVHVM stuff may be available and uses it when it is there.

It should support multiple processors just fine, I have not tested the RAM amount myself, but don’t see a reason why it would be a problem.

most important part of my config is this:

kernel = '/usr/lib/xen-4.0/boot/hvmloader'
device_model = '/usr/lib/xen-4.0/bin/qemu-dm'
builder = ‘hvm'


Regards,
Jeroen.