FreeBSD PVHVM call for testing

[Outback Dingo]

On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 2:32 PM, Roger Pau Monné <roger.pau at citrix.com>wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Recently Justin T Gibbs, Will Andrews and myself have been working on
> improving the Xen support in FreeBSD. The main goal of this was to bring
> full PVHVM support to FreeBSD, right now FreeBSD is only using PV
> interfaces for disk and network interfaces when running as a HVM guest.
> The main benefits of this changes are that Xen virtual interrupts (event
> channels) are now delivered to the guest using a vector callback
> injection, that is a per-cpu mechanism that allows each vCPU to have
> different interrupts assigned, so for example network and disk
> interrupts are delivered to different vCPUs in order to improve
> performance. With this changes FreeBSD also uses PV timers when running
> as an HVM guest, which should provide better time keeping and reduce the
> virtualization overhead, since emulated timers are no longer used. PV
> IPIs can also be used inside a HVM guest, but this will be implemented
> later.
>
> Right now the code is in a state where it can be tested by users, so we
> would like to encourage FreeBSD and Xen users to test it and provide
> feedback.
>
> The code is available in the following git repository, under the branch
> pvhvm_v5:
>
> http://xenbits.xen.org/gitweb/?p=people/royger/freebsd.git;a=summary
>
> Also, I've created a wiki page that explains how to set up a FreeBSD
> PVHVM for testing:
>
> http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Testing_FreeBSD_PVHVM



Hey Guys,

Huge KUDOS to some great work, Ive gotten 4 VMs booting from zfsonroot with
the rev_9 finally under XCP 1.6
after getting through removal of the cdrom device from VMs, they are booted
and running supremely nice now.
IO for zfs filesystems is much better inside the VMs now, even with 4mb
compared to what it was. This is a huge
move forward and personally I just wanted to say thanks for this and all
the work you put into it. The VMs appear quite stable for me, and are
pleasantly responsive with low mem on zpools. Great job and again.....
Thanks. Keep up the great effort.


>
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