My deepest apologies; my response to Pete's email didn't hit the list. Message below:<br><span class="gmail_quote"><br></span><span class="q"><span class="gmail_quote">On 8/1/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Peter Wright
</b> <<a href="mailto:pete@nomadlogic.org" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">pete@nomadlogic.org</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-bottom: 0; margin-left: 0; margin-left: 0.80ex; border-left-color: #cccccc; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; padding-left: 1ex">
<br>> I was just wondering, has anyone managed to get FreeBSD running under Xen?<br>> Anyone managed to get it to run as dom0, even?<br>><br>> In my humble (and worthless) opinion, I think Xen would make an awesome
<br>> companion<br>> to jails, since having the both of them means you have the option of both<br>> "lightweight"<br>> and "heavyweight" virtualization.<br>><br>> So if anyone has managed to get this going, I'd be happy to hear about it.
<br>> :)<br><br>I would not expect any para-virt bit's to get committed to the FreeBSD<br>kernel any time soon. There has been some work to get this going, but it<br>was for the 5.3 branch.</blockquote></span><div>
<br>:-( Thats saddening. </div><span class="q"><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-bottom: 0; margin-left: 0; margin-left: 0.80ex; border-left-color: #cccccc; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; padding-left: 1ex">
so - I wouldn't hold my breath on a domU implementation of FreeBSD.<br>getting a dom0 is also probably not going to happen any time soon either -<br>although the NetBSD team has had this working for some time.</blockquote>
</span><div><br>I was using NetBSD to run Xen 2 guests for a while there. Its pretty nice, and<br>the whole reason I would rather a BSD as a dom0 instead of Linux is because,<br>well, BSD feels much more "solid". (Apologies for my n00bish descriptive terms.)
<br>I believe Net supports Xen 3 now too, but I was really interested in running it on<br>FreeBSD. But alas.... :-( </div><span class="q"><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-bottom: 0; margin-left: 0; margin-left: 0.80ex; border-left-color: #cccccc; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; padding-left: 1ex">
Here's my two bits (i've been doing alot of work with Xen and Jails while<br>building HPC datacenters spread globally ) - i think both methods have<br>their place. Jailing works great in many environments where something
<br>like Xen would be overkill (core IT services come immediately to mind ).</blockquote></span><div><br>Totally agree here. Although wouldn't it be great just to run an OpenBSD<br>guest just for your infrastructure bits? :) (Although I do recognize that as
<br>stupid since you're just increasing layers and attack surface for no good reason.<br>"Just 'cause I can" is as good a reason as any, no? :] )<br></div><span class="q"><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-bottom: 0; margin-left: 0; margin-left: 0.80ex; border-left-color: #cccccc; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; padding-left: 1ex">
One of Xen's strengths is it's ability to set hard caps on memory and cpu<br>usage, along with "live-migration"; although both potentially come with<br>performance cost. so really, i think they compliment each other.
</blockquote></span><div><br>Is there any work to bring these features to jails? I've not been around the BSD<br>universe for very long, but I'm 100% positive that _hordes_ of people would be<br>absolutely thrilled at the idea of being able to jail CPU and memory utilization.
<br></div><span class="q"><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-bottom: 0; margin-left: 0; margin-left: 0.80ex; border-left-color: #cccccc; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; padding-left: 1ex">
I think before any of the *BSDs start tackling something as complicated as<br>Xen i'd like to see better support for things like iSCSI (both hardware<br>and software initiators/targets), FC and PXE. when you get into
<br>virtualizing, the ability to decouple your storage from your CPU/RAM is a<br>very important piece of this puzzle.</blockquote></span><div><br>Agreed.<br><br>On a related note, haven't mainframes and big iron been working this way already
<br>for quite some time? I have no experience with these, but the whole concept or<br>IBM's LPARS (if I'm not mistaken) is connected to this. Its as if tech on mainframes<br>and tech on plain-old COTS desktops and servers are converging upon each other.
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