Re: OpenStack hosting with FreeBSD + bhyve?

Dear Mihai:

That’s really helpful, thanks!

We’ll need to finish up our baseline bhyve work for Morello in simulation, and once that’s looking good, will hopefully be able to turn our attention to this more specifically in the autumn. It’s excellent to know that there has been work done already in this space.

Robert

> On 26 Jul 2021, at 19:43, Mihai Carabas <mihai.carabas@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello Robert,
> 
> We are also running Openstack at our University (University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest). Mainly we are using KVM hypervisors.
> 
> We had last year a diploma project to bring in support for bhyve as a hypervisor in Openstack. The whole nova part was resolved (we were able to create guests using the Openstack commands) but openvswitch (used by neutron service) was still in progress (so no networking at that time). There is a paper that does an overview of the current work: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9266213 <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9266213>
> 
> If you need more details or acces to code, Sergiu and Elena at CC can help us.
> 
> Thank you,
> Mihai
> 
> On Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 9:24 PM Robert N. M. Watson <robert.watson@cl.cam.ac.uk <mailto:robert.watson@cl.cam.ac.uk>> wrote:
> Hi all:
> 
> Arm is releasing a new experimental CPU + SoC + board in early 2021, Morello, based on our CHERI research at SRI International and the University of Cambridge. At Cambridge, we’re looking to create a ‘Morello Cloud’ facility to allow intra- and inter-institutional access to Morello virtual machines hosted on a couple of racks of Morello boards, which would run CheriBSD (our CHERI-extended version of FreeBSD). Cambridge's Research Computing Services currently use OpenStack to host VMs on several HPC clusters out of our main university datacenter, and it seems that we will ask them to host and manage the Morello Cloud facility for us. We’ve identified and largely resolved on key technical dependency, bhyve support for not just arm64, but also Morello, and so that seems likely to be ready by our 2022 launch date.
> 
> Which then raises the question: What obstacles exist between us and having FreeBSD host OpenStack compute VMs using bhyve on these boards? OpenStack has a lot of moving parts, and casual googling has not made it immediately obvious to me whether there is currently a community of FreeBSD OpenStack users using FreeBSD for hosting, rather than just on VMs. I see lots of queries (and information) on VM image creation, but all I’ve spotted really spotted on the hosting topic was a 2014 presentation from Semihalf. However, their Nova GitHub repository that appears untouched since roughly then:
> 
>         https://github.com/Semihalf/openstack-nova <https://github.com/Semihalf/openstack-nova> <https://github.com/Semihalf/openstack-nova <https://github.com/Semihalf/openstack-nova>>
> 
> I wonder if anyone on this list could point me at anything more recent, or if there are folks actively working on this currently / have OpenStack deployed with FreeBSD hosting + bhyve? We can put in some amount of engineering effort, but right now we’re running a bit context free as to whether there’s existing work in this space.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Robert