bhyve and legacy

[Tycho Nightingale]

Hi,

Interest?  Yes!  Matter of fact, I have some scraps of 8259 support lying around here if you are keen to have a starting point.

Now with respect to bhyveload, while it certainly does have some FreeBSD-specific uses, it is a bit of a barrier to supporting non-FreeBSD guests and furthermore supporting them well e.g. reboot without bhyve exiting.  If 'true' support existed for booting from an iso, then with a quick 'mkisofs' you could achieve the same kernel-to-VM turnaround without bhyveload.

Tycho

On Jan 22, 2014, at 5:15 PM, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:

> Is there any interest in supporting more "legacy" setups via bhyve?  In 
> particular, I'd like to take a whack at improving the PCI INTx support, but 
> that can involve several things such as possibly implementing 8259A support 
> and a PCI interrupt router vs always assuming that we have APICs.  If we do 
> want to support a more legacy route, is there interest in supporting a BIOS 
> interface in the VM?  I know that one option is to go grab a BIOS ROM from 
> something like qemu, but another option is to have the real-mode IDT vector to 
> stub routines in a very small ROM that traps to the hypervisor to implement 
> BIOS requests.  OTOH, that may turn out to be rather messy.
> 
> Finally, I noticed a comment fly by about removing the need for bhyveload.  
> One thing I have found useful recently is passing -H to bhyveload.  
> Specifically, I can build a test kernel outside of the VM on the host and 
> access it via the host0 filesystem in bhyveload so I can easily test kernels 
> in the VM while still using the host as my development environment.  It would 
> be nice to retain this ability in some fashion.
> 
> -- 
> John Baldwin
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