Bhyve tests and findings

[Matt Churchyard]

> Zitat von Peter Grehan <grehan at freebsd.org>:

> Hi Mike,
>
>> - Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 installs and runs in graphical mode flawlessly.
>
>  Have you had any issues with the XHCI mouse on 8/8.1 ?
>
>> - I was able to graphically Restore/Reconfigure a Acronis 
>> Windows-Backup into a Bhyve instance  using the Acronis Restore-CD 
>> (Converting a BIOS Win8.1 to UEFI Win8.1)
>
>  Very nice !
>
>> - Only vnclient from FreeBSD can connect to the bhyve VNC Server.
>>  I havn't found any vncviewer running on Windows which where able to 
>> work (tried UltraVNC, RealVNC, ...)
>
>  Some VNC clients refuse to connect when only null-auth is advertized 
> by the server. There is a patch to bhyve to support VNC password-auth, 
> which may fix the issue with these clients.
>

>Yes, that sounds reasonable.

>> - in VNC only most basic Keys work most special characters like (*\@) 
>> (and of course no german localization)  but at least a usual US-kbd 
>> would be helpful.
>>  (Is there a way to debug the keystrokes or duplicate a localized VNC 
>> kbd from some VNC server)
>
>  Nothing outside of modifying the source, but it seems useful enough 
> to add a parameter for this.
>
>> - For the SAP-Systems it seems that only 4 disks get used when the 
>> disk type is virtio-blk.
>>  (Is this intentionally or a feature of vm-bhyve? How to provide more
>> disks)
>
>  I'll let Matt comment on that. There's no limitation with guests that 
> support MSI interrupts for adapters. Unfortunately, Windows guests 
> require legacy interrupts for the AHCI controller, which is where the 
> restriction originates.
>

>I'd like to use a 6 disks setup with Centos7.
>Centos7 on XEN PVM has no issue with supporting 6 paravirtulized disks.

>Thats the config (for vm-bhyve) where only the first 4 disks are used for the guest (Centos7):

>uefi="yes"
>cpu=1
>memory=2G
>network0_type="virtio-net"
>network0_switch="public"
>disk0_name="root"
>disk0_type="virtio-blk"
>disk0_dev="zvol"
>disk1_name="swap"
>disk1_type="virtio-blk"
>disk1_dev="zvol"
>disk2_name="sapmnt"
>disk2_type="virtio-blk"
>disk2_dev="zvol"
>disk3_name="usrsap"
>disk3_type="virtio-blk"
>disk3_dev="zvol"
>disk4_name="db"
>disk4_type="virtio-blk"
>disk4_dev="zvol"
>disk5_name="log"
>disk5_type="virtio-blk"
>disk5_dev="zvol"
>graphics="yes"
>graphics_port="5903"
>graphics_listen="0.0.0.0"
>graphics_res="1600x900"
>graphics_wait="no"
>xhci_mouse="yes"

Sorry I didn't actually spot that you were using my vm-bhyve code to run the guest the first time.

The UEFI code in vm-bhyve is currently limited to using slots 4/5/6 for disks so you should only see 3... (I put a CD device on slot 3)
If you look in the /path/to/guest/vm-bhyve.log log file you'll probably see something like "ending disks as disk2 due to UEFI limitations".

I've never been 100% on which guests have the limitation and which don't, so in UEFI mode I played it safe and just used the 3 slots. If you run the guest with the grub loader instead of UEFI you should get all the disks.

If you want, you can comment out the limitation in the vm-bhyve source and see if the guest will pick up the extra disks. It's the 4 lines after the "can't go past slot 6" comment around line 364 of lib/vm-run. If it works it may be worth me adding a configuration option to toggle this limit.

As mentioned in my last email FreeBSD CURRENT (12) now supports up to 32 disks per ahci device, and I've successfully had 8 disks in Windows using just 1 pci slot. This won't be in 11.0 unfortunately (as far as I'm aware) but I hope it gets merged into a future 11 release.

Matt