From owner-freebsd-emulation@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Jan 10 02:51:45 2011 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-emulation@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 912411065670 for ; Mon, 10 Jan 2011 02:51:45 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from amvandemore@gmail.com) Received: from mail-fx0-f54.google.com (mail-fx0-f54.google.com [209.85.161.54]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1ADC28FC08 for ; Mon, 10 Jan 2011 02:51:44 +0000 (UTC) Received: by fxm16 with SMTP id 16so18465524fxm.13 for ; Sun, 09 Jan 2011 18:51:44 -0800 (PST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=domainkey-signature:mime-version:received:received:in-reply-to :references:date:message-id:subject:from:to:cc:content-type; bh=BOySdvP6DBSTZK3TvSbifflZRw6j44WryhWGewe94ps=; b=czR20TkhpZBTmRlF9YSFZeryI/53jnq22Zgej+6Jo1Xg8Ow0iYZlh+gNgXiNhJoR6b KRTD0Y9SqW4PFyKZtpgAKJQ3781URWq8E3XV2ReYyFW53qJmFQj4ZjczLDWbF5fyQkZe F8M6FJlkuVMqkSkhW6GZ3hPQVH44FChVYjzXM= DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=mime-version:in-reply-to:references:date:message-id:subject:from:to :cc:content-type; b=haAT7zUVC4yc6G0/8OX/XHV5DLoMF984e1RqvYq9L4Sh/MOHchTVmM+OQrCFZ0LT6c OJtflX4lgm/baHKi4AYJqQqxhIbnqrJRDUzwmy/V7OykEVhHmzDzs4IH+xSIfeWeMvAN GU5L3TCx0ze1lG3YluenJkNDzNKUb9/m9LuFE= MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.223.97.78 with SMTP id k14mr2293210fan.89.1294627904026; Sun, 09 Jan 2011 18:51:44 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.223.114.4 with HTTP; Sun, 9 Jan 2011 18:51:43 -0800 (PST) In-Reply-To: <4D2A55F4.6010704@mittelstaedt.us> References: <20100418191752.GA72730@triton8.kn-bremen.de> <20110107194516.GA28544@triton8.kn-bremen.de> <20110107213643.GA32645@triton8.kn-bremen.de> <20110109110022.GA10789@triton8.kn-bremen.de> <4D2A55F4.6010704@mittelstaedt.us> Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2011 20:51:43 -0600 Message-ID: From: Adam Vande More To: Ted Mittelstaedt Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 X-Content-Filtered-By: Mailman/MimeDel 2.1.5 Cc: freebsd-emulation@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Testing Luvalley with FreeBSD as dom0 X-BeenThere: freebsd-emulation@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Development of Emulators of other operating systems List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2011 02:51:45 -0000 On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 6:42 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > 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. > Now days, there is very little, if any difference in guest speed(cpu based operations) in either type 1 or 2 hypervisors. Both types basically let the code run directly on the cpu, except they aren't allowed to touch ring 0. I was having a great of difficulty a few months ago with virtualization debian host I had set up. One of the Windows guests saw some high peak in network traffic which caused various issues which the virtio drivers didn't resolve. With it being a file server among other things, the flakiness had to be resolved. The physical box was a recent Dell Xeon with pair of broadcom and intel nics and the orginal hypervisor I used was KVM. The one in Debian's repository at the time was somewhat old, but that's what the client originally requested. Since this setup didn't work, I moved it over to the current proprietary version of Virtualbox which did better, but not satifactory because issues were still present. Finally, I moved it to Xen 4 because I knew it had pci-pass-through support and those broadcoms were sitting there doing nothing. The pci-pass-through of the broadcoms to the Windows guest works great. I haven't had another problem with the box. So the point of my story is that I think a modern KVM is just as fast and featureful as Xen since they both have pci-pass-through and you should expect the same(roughly) performance on your guests withever recent hypervisor you choose. Virtualbox is fast too, maybe even a bit faster than KVM but until it gets pci-pass-through it won't be as feature complete as the others. I think the luvalley approach is quite innovative and interesting, but honestly the main reason for my inquiry into it is that IMO it's only a matter of time till Oracle decides they need to make money from Vbox, and I don't want to see FreeBSD lose this technology which has been such a boon for me and many others. kqemu is only good for so much ;) -- Adam Vande More