Xen & Freebsd

[nforcemac]

Hi there,

I run an IT Consultancy company and we would like to start offering FreeBSD vps's for customers. I know Xen used to be flakey on FreeBSD, has there been any real movement on it to date. Google turns up very little.

Thanks

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by nforcemac

Hi there,

I run an IT Consultancy company and we would like to start offering FreeBSD vps's for customers. I know Xen used to be flakey on FreeBSD, has there been any real movement on it to date. Google turns up very little.

Thanks

You cannot install Xen on FreeBSD (run FreeBSD as dom0). NetBSD has dom0 support, though.

You cannot, easily, run FreeBSD in a Xen paravirtualised (PV) domU.

You can only install FreeBSD into a Xen hardware-assisted/fully-virtualised (HVM) domU if you used AMD CPUs with SVM support. There's a bug in Intel hardware virtualisation support in Xen 3.x that causes FreeBSD to crash.

If your CPUs supporft hradware virt (Intel VT or AMD SVM), you'd be better off using Linux on the host and KVM. FreeBSD runs very nicely on thst.

[graudeejs]

Why not give a shoot at qemu?

[ninjatux]

Is work even being done to get Xen on FreeBSD?

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by killasmurf

Why not give a shoot at qemu?

Because you'll be lucky to get 75% native CPU speed, and 50% network/block I/O?

QEmu is ubiquitous, and used by a lot of other projects, but it's definitely no speed demon, on any host platform.

[nforcemac]

thanks for replying.

I've come across this lot rootbsd.net that appear to be running Xen virtual machines. Is the host possibly ubuntu/debian or something like that?

Thanks again

[phoenix]

You would have to contact them for the answer.

They could be running a custom PV version of FreeBSD (there are patch sets of various completion floating around the 'Net).

Or they could be running FreeBSD in HVMs using custom patches to workaround the bugs.

Or they could be running xen-unstable.

Or ... or ... or ...

[nforcemac]

Originally Posted by phoenix

You would have to contact them for the answer.

They could be running a custom PV version of FreeBSD (there are patch sets of various completion floating around the 'Net).

Or they could be running FreeBSD in HVMs using custom patches to workaround the bugs.

Or they could be running xen-unstable.

Or ... or ... or ...

Got the idea! Thanks

[Weaseal]

For semi-current Xen on FreeBSD info, check out:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/Xen

I heard some rumors of it working roughly on 8-CURRENT but it is in dire need of a dedicated maintainer to continue to progress.