Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2011 19:19:28 +0100 From: Juergen Lock <nox@jelal.kn-bremen.de> To: Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@mittelstaedt.us> Cc: freebsd-emulation@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Testing Luvalley with FreeBSD as dom0 Message-ID: <20110110181928.GA60704@triton8.kn-bremen.de> In-Reply-To: <4D2A55F4.6010704@mittelstaedt.us> References: <w2r3b0605b31004181554tb90de59u6df8ebd5b1206caa@mail.gmail.com> <AANLkTi=nhk%2BeCG6kbe4LfeaTQWkKaVcr%2BRx2LrKparDO@mail.gmail.com> <20110107194516.GA28544@triton8.kn-bremen.de> <AANLkTikvP8SezKEZYSUimaj3u8fkk2Vw6-aY09KV=RF3@mail.gmail.com> <20110107213643.GA32645@triton8.kn-bremen.de> <AANLkTi=2Nn8xeKudxb2uSR=aLx0GW43gVPCdL-=hjP7z@mail.gmail.com> <AANLkTikbuWJbtPYaLW=8BEH4f5oiumzEN6rgwOB5tC=R@mail.gmail.com> <20110109110022.GA10789@triton8.kn-bremen.de> <AANLkTik9Ckh2UAaed=YYbBFCP6yyd6kOmSXdEYmZPiEd@mail.gmail.com> <4D2A55F4.6010704@mittelstaedt.us>
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On Sun, Jan 09, 2011 at 04:42:28PM -0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > > I think the Luvalley architecture is fascinating but one of the larger > problems that has always been faced by the Open Source Community has > been lack of device driver support for all of the many peripherals and > motherboards and bits of hardware out there. > > This is the problem with "bare metal" hypervisors, we see exactly the > same problem with commercial use of the ESXi "bare metal" hypervisor - > limited device driver support - and the worst, being disk driver > support. ESXi, being based on Linux, has no > good support for SATA-raid (ie: poor mans pseudo RAID 0 ) FreeBSD > by contrast, has excellent support, far better than Linux. > > The practical reality of it is I can go out and buy a brand new, > super-fast computer and run FreeBSD 8 on it then VirtualBox on that, > then my guest OS's under VirtualBox - and get the same performance > as a bare-metal hypervisor like ESXi or Luvalley on older hardware. > And, with the FreeBSD/VirtualBox way, I get access to a far wider array > of hardware including disk RAID hardware. > > Thus, I have to say that I feel the bare-metal hypervisor approach > is a dead-end. Yes, I realize ESX has made a lot of money with this > approach but the newest hardware coming on the scene is incredibly > fast. Even if you put pseudo raid support into luvalley, your never > going to get the kind of hardware support that you can get from > an operating system that is used for far many more things than > just virtualization. Actually I don't think Luvalley even has disk drivers, it relies on (usually) grub for booting (which in turn relies on bios support for the boot disk(s)), and once the dom0 kernel is booted (i.e. Linux or FreeBSD), that one talks to the controller(s) directly. So only the domU (guest) kernels talk to virtualized hardware, and that hardware is emulated by the Luvalley version of qemu-kvm (which uses the dom0 kernel's drivers to talk to the actual hardware.) Oh, I know of one `driver' in Luvalley tho, the one for the serial port that's used for debug output... Cheers, Juergen
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