Re: Mentor of the Project "PCI frontend XEN PV driver"？

[Justin T. Gibbs]

On Apr 18, 2013, at 7:14 AM, Bei Guan <gbtju85 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2013/4/16 Justin T. Gibbs <gibbs at freebsd.org>
> On Apr 12, 2013, at 3:02 AM, Bei Guan <gbtju85 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Thank you for your reply.
> >
> > I think it's also a good project for me to write a SCSI or USB PV frontend for FreeBSD. I'm interest in Xen and have done some development about Xen PV and HVM, but I didn't do any development on FreeBSD. As to this project, where should I start? Is there any other similar FreeBSD project I can refer to?
> 
> Front-end drivers for network, block, and control already exist and should serve as a good starting point for the creation of another PV driver.
> 
> I've also updated the ideas page to include more information about our existing XEN implementation and what will be required for these projects.
> 
> > In order to write a SCSI or USB PV driver, do we need the Xen PV drivers in FreeBSD, such as event channel, hypercalls, xenbus, and so on?
> 
> Yes, FreeBSD already has support for all XenBus APIs needed to write these drivers.  See "sys/xen" and "sys/dev/xen" in the FreeBSD kernel source tree.
> 
> > You said the "drivers can be developed using an HVM guest", can you give me more information about it?
> 
> Typically, you install FreeBSD using standard install media as a full HVM guest on a system running Xen.  Then compile a custom kernel using the XENHVM config file in order to activate the existing PV drivers.
> Hi Justin,
> 
> Does this project need to provide USB/SCSI PV drivers to both 32-bit and 64-bit FreeBSD?

Idealy, yes.

> I've compiled the FreeBSD 8.3 (i386) as Xen DomU with the XENHVM config. But, It cannot boot successfully. The screenshot is attached.
> According to the page https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/Xen , 32-bit FreeBSD should work when compiled with XENHVM config.

I have never tried a 32bit XENHVM configuration, but I know of no reasons why it should not work.  The issue shown by your screen shot (in your other email) is probably due to a PV driver failing to fully attach, or a mistake in the merge of SVN changeset 211236 to releng-8.  I would suggest instrumenting sys/xen/xenbus/xenbusb.c to determine the driver that is still holding up the root mount process and then go from there.  See xenbusb_attach() and xenbusb_nop_confighook_cb() for details.

You may also want to invest in changing your Xen configuration to use a serial console.  This will allow you to properly log and examine all kernel messages emitted during your test runs. 

> I will try the 64-bit FreeBSD. However, if the FreeBSD boot successfully (compiled with XENHVM config), how can we know it really uses the PV drivers instead of the native drivers?

Your configuration is definitely using PV drivers.  xenbusb_front, xn, and xbd, are all PV drivers.

--
Justin