kern/182089: Xen Disk and Net drivers should go to GENERIC

[Florian Heigl]

>Number:         182089
>Category:       kern
>Synopsis:       Xen Disk and Net drivers should go to GENERIC
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       non-critical
>Priority:       low
>Responsible:    freebsd-bugs
>State:          open
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          change-request
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Sat Sep 14 12:40:00 UTC 2013
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Florian Heigl
>Release:        9.x 10.x
>Organization:
>Environment:
FreeBSD freebsd1 9.1-STABLE FreeBSD 9.1-STABLE #0: Sun Jul  7 23:12:23 EEST 2013     root at freebsd:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/XENHVM  amd64

>Description:
For some time, FreeBSD has now come with the XENHVM kernconf.

The disk and net drivers are not included in GENERIC though. This means a potential user needs to configure a VM using emulated drivers, use those slow drivers to check out sources, go through his first kernel build, and then install this kernel, then hope it works. Then switch to using PV drivers on the host, test and see if it works, and then, in the worst case, switch back to apply any fixes.

He'll also need to go through parts of the procedure should he want to use a FreeBSD ISO to do some stuff from the rescue shell.

If those drivers were included, this would make things a lot easier for typical folk, so i.e. a linux user could setup a FreeBSD VM using his available tools (gpt partition, make ufs filesystem, chroot, extract dists, edit config => bootable vm)

Right now they cannot do that, which isn't "helped" by the almost(*i know!) complete inexistance of ready FreeBSD diskimages. 
>How-To-Repeat:
Eating own dogfood :)
>Fix:
Add the most basic drivers (disk, net) to GENERIC.

>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: