From owner-freebsd-virtualization@FreeBSD.ORG Mon May 13 18:33:00 2013 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-virtualization@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:1900:2254:206a::19:1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 37B2456F; Mon, 13 May 2013 18:33:00 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from roger.pau@citrix.com) Received: from SMTP.EU.CITRIX.COM (smtp.eu.citrix.com [46.33.159.39]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A838EE9; Mon, 13 May 2013 18:32:59 +0000 (UTC) X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.87,552,1363132800"; d="scan'208";a="4515670" Received: from lonpmailmx01.citrite.net ([10.30.203.162]) by LONPIPO01.EU.CITRIX.COM with ESMTP/TLS/RC4-MD5; 13 May 2013 18:23:52 +0000 Received: from Roger-2.local (10.30.249.38) by LONPMAILMX01.citrite.net (10.30.203.162) with Microsoft SMTP Server id 8.3.298.1; Mon, 13 May 2013 19:32:57 +0100 Message-ID: <519131D8.9010307@citrix.com> Date: Mon, 13 May 2013 20:32:56 +0200 From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Roger_Pau_Monn=E9?= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130328 Thunderbird/17.0.5 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "freebsd-xen@freebsd.org" Subject: FreeBSD PVHVM call for testing Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: "xen-users@lists.xen.org" , "freebsd-virtualization@freebsd.org" , xen-devel X-BeenThere: freebsd-virtualization@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: "Discussion of various virtualization techniques FreeBSD supports." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 13 May 2013 18:33:00 -0000 Hello, Recently Justin T Gibbs, Will Andrews and myself have been working on improving the Xen support in FreeBSD. The main goal of this was to bring full PVHVM support to FreeBSD, right now FreeBSD is only using PV interfaces for disk and network interfaces when running as a HVM guest. The main benefits of this changes are that Xen virtual interrupts (event channels) are now delivered to the guest using a vector callback injection, that is a per-cpu mechanism that allows each vCPU to have different interrupts assigned, so for example network and disk interrupts are delivered to different vCPUs in order to improve performance. With this changes FreeBSD also uses PV timers when running as an HVM guest, which should provide better time keeping and reduce the virtualization overhead, since emulated timers are no longer used. PV IPIs can also be used inside a HVM guest, but this will be implemented later. Right now the code is in a state where it can be tested by users, so we would like to encourage FreeBSD and Xen users to test it and provide feedback. The code is available in the following git repository, under the branch pvhvm_v5: http://xenbits.xen.org/gitweb/?p=people/royger/freebsd.git;a=summary Also, I've created a wiki page that explains how to set up a FreeBSD PVHVM for testing: http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Testing_FreeBSD_PVHVM