bhyve and legacy

[Neel Natu]

Hi John,

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 2:15 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

I would love to see PCI INTx support so we can do legacy interrupts
for the virtio device models.

However, does that require going all the way back to 8259 style
interrupts? It should work fine with IOAPIC, no?

> 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.
>

Yes, absolutely.

best
Neel

> --
> John Baldwin
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