Xen stuff

[Doug Rabson]

On 1 Dec 2008, at 18:45, Ivan Voras wrote:

> 2008/12/1 Doug Rabson <dfr at rabson.org>:
>> I will be working on improving Xen support in FreeBSD for the new few
>
> Great!
>
>> months. My main goal is to add support for native Xen drivers to an  
>> amd64
>> kernel which is running in Xen's HVM mode. These drivers will take  
>> over from
>> the slow emulated devices and provide most of the performance  
>> benefits of a
>> paravirtualised kernel. I'm initially going to be supporting  
>> FreeBSD 6.x but
>> I will port it all forward to head and 7.x when it works properly.
>
> For the not-quite-yet-initiated : does this mean you're working on
> paravirtualized drivers for Xen dom-U ("guest" case)?

Sort of. The latest versions of Xen support something called HVM mode  
which allows it to boot a completely unmodified guest OS using  
emulated devices in a similar way to e.g. VMware Fusion. It is then  
possible to incrementally add Xen-aware paravirtualised drivers which  
can replace the emulated ones and which perform better. This is how  
they support Windows under Xen.