bhyve manager

[Harry Schmalzbauer]

Bezüglich Ruben's Nachricht vom 26.02.2018 10:15 (localtime):

…
> On 26/02/2018 10:09, Harry Schmalzbauer wrote:
>>  Bezüglich tech-lists's Nachricht vom 25.02.2018 14:14 (localtime):
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> What do folks use for their bhyve guest management?
>>>
…
>> Copy'n'pasting relevant lines from 'cat ~/vm-launches.txt'
>>
>> Reason:
>> I very much dislike utilizing if_bridge(4), instead would prefere
>> vale(4), but that's reproducibly locking up in real world setups.
>> So my choice is ng_bridge(4), which isn't covered by any byhve(4) helper
> Hi Harry,
> 
> 
> What are your reasons for preferring ng_bridge over the "normal" bridge?

Two very different main reasons:
if_bridge(4) is very standards compliant (e.g. that different reserved
MAC addresses won't get forwarded – don't know any explicit examples out
of mind), which was problematic for some SDN setups (software defined
networking, in means of sharing a PHY for multiple VMs and
simultaniously interconnect VMs to VMs)

Another, personally very significant, reason is that you'll get a
superfluous host interface for each if_bridge(4), which makes the output
of plain ifconfig(8) kind of unreadable.
For VM SDN, I don't need/want those host interfaces, despite they don't
do any harm.

vale(4) was extremely convinient.  Simply create a switch, then each VM
attaches on the fly :-)
Unfortunately, I'm unable to debug the lockups and my setups was kind of
hacky, since I haven't used NIC's native netmap(4) support, but used
emulated netmap(4) for if_vlan(4).  This leads to loss of almost all
performance advantages, but left convinience advantages.  Unfortunately,
emulated netmap(4) is supposed to have some unresolved problems on
FreeBSD and upstream hackers consider my hacky setup as wrong by nature
– which it is technically speaking.  For real-world usagen, one would
need to code a VLAN filter between bhyve(4) and vale(4). Skillwise, I'm
not the one :-(

-harry