vkernel & GSoC, some questions

[Igor Shmukler]

> I have thought of the vkernel primarily as an aid to kernel development 
> (where performance is not a prime concern), not as a virtualisation 
> solution that will compete with Xen and VMWare. It's difficult to 
> compete with thousands of men-hours paid by corporate funding.
> 
> So far nobody has expressed interest in vkernels as a tool for kernel 
> development. And I got the general impression that I've proposed 
> something stupid and useless.

I don't think that what you have proposed is stupid or useless. Sorry if I came across rude.

However, if I understand what Matt has done correctly, DragonFly can be used to develop virtualized FreeBSD and the 5 seconds restart would still be there. [Perhaps, some extension might be necessary, but fundamentally it should be possible. Is it not?]

If that indeed is the case, I would rather more people worked on the same codebase as opposed to everyone maintaining their own version [one with renaming and the one without]. Would it not be better to extend existing vkernels on DragonFly to do more and support other guests making into a [more] powerful kernel development platform?

BSDs have many great "things" to offer, but there is not enough people. I was under the impression even laptops are not fully supported yet. That has been on the TODO for years.

If the goal is have the "power to serve" real people, extending the existing jail into a complete container is probably more useful. Does it matter whether a developer is using FreeBSD-over-FreeBSD instead of virtualized FreeBSD over DragonFly?

Even easier could be extending FreeBSD to support afterburning and running L4FreeBSD as an L4 server. 
That is however another dog with different fleas.