FreeBSD in the Oracle Knowledge base (Oracle VM)

[Bernhard Froehlich]

On Wed, 3 Aug 2011 22:19:22 +0200, Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> today I stumbled upon the possibility to chose FreeBSD as a filter in
> the Oracle Support pages. I searched a little bit and found the reason.
> It seems Oracle has answers to questions about FreeBSD and virtualbox.
> 
> I thought this may be interesting to someone here. In case someone
> knows a little bit more about the level of support Oracle gives
> regarding this, I would be interested to hear more about it.

That's interesting. Could you share that link?

The current status is that FreeBSD is officially not supported at all.
Not as Guest and not as Host. For FreeBSD host support they need an OEM
customer that requests official support. Klaus told me that they don't
have any resources for that at the moment so they would have to hire a
few people and it won't be cheap for the OEM.

Well. That's the official situation. I don't think waiting for such a
customer is worth it.

Unofficially the situation looks a lot better. They opened a lot of
code from the former closed source blobs and created APIs to extend the
functionality. The FreeBSD community is very active with feedback and
patches that we push upstream. That works very well and we have good
communication with the developers. And then there is Alexander Eichner
who did all the initial work and our fast track to get FreeBSD specific
patches committed. He is kept very busy recently but is still doing very
valuable work for us. It is a bit problematic to get bugs fixed because
the vbox code is quite complex and non trivial so we depend a lot on
them and cannot debug or fix many problems ourselves.

-- 
Bernhard Fröhlich
http://www.bluelife.at/