Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2013 12:27:25 +0100 From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Roger_Pau_Monn=E9?= <roger.pau@citrix.com> To: Hilton Day <hilton.day@gmail.com>, <freebsd-xen@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Paravirt domU and PCI Passthrough Message-ID: <527B791D.2030302@citrix.com> In-Reply-To: <CABomu8P88ZfJvO7sPd9-L6Thcaoxj7WgjUKuud3VU40D6h1C9w@mail.gmail.com> References: <CABomu8P88ZfJvO7sPd9-L6Thcaoxj7WgjUKuud3VU40D6h1C9w@mail.gmail.com>
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On 05/11/13 09:43, Hilton Day wrote: > Hi - firstly a warning. While I've been running Xen on Linux for about 6 > years, I've only just started to scratch the surface of freeBSD. > > I just compiled a (working) paravirt kernel for freeBSD 8.3 (actually for > pfSense firewall), and have succeeded in running it with a couple of > virtual interfaces. However, I've struck a couple of limitations: > > 1. Seems to be no support for the Xen pcifront to enable pci passthrough > to paravirt domUs? No, there's no pcifrontend, so right now it's not possible to use i386 PV guests with pci-passthrough. > 2. SMP support seems to be broken - I get a kernel panic with more than > one core for the VM. Yes, it's broken. > I've had a look and can't find anything like the Linux kernel option > for CONFIG_XEN_PCIDEV_FRONTEND > to enable pci support in paravirt? (but this could be lack of familiarity > with freeBSD build process/tree/files). > > I've succeessfully passed thorugh the same NIC to freeBSD Xen HVM domUs > (running 8.3 and 9.1), but would prefer to get a fully paravirt instance up > and running. > > Is PCI Passthrough possible with a freeBSD paravirt domU? I just set up a > freeBSD 10 BETA2 environment and have kicked off the build process with: > >> make buildkernel KERNCONF=XEN > > I'm just wondering whether I'm chasing a dead end and should just settle > for a XEN HVM solution? There have been a lot of improvements recently (that apply to both HEAD and stable-10) in order to get PVHVM working, which has a performance similar to pure PV (or even better depending on the workload). Also, i386 PV is currently broken on both HEAD and stable-10 AFAIK, so I would recommend switching to PVHVM instead. Roger.
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