From owner-freebsd-emulation@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Jan 10 05:11:36 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 F05B81065675 for ; Mon, 10 Jan 2011 05:11:35 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from tedm@mittelstaedt.us) Received: from mail.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com (mail.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com [65.75.192.90]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AA3F28FC1E for ; Mon, 10 Jan 2011 05:11:35 +0000 (UTC) Received: from [192.168.1.64] (nat-rtr.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com [65.75.197.130]) by mail.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com (8.14.3/8.14.3) with ESMTP id p0A5BYdY090002; Sun, 9 Jan 2011 21:11:34 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from tedm@mittelstaedt.us) Message-ID: <4D2A9504.7070109@mittelstaedt.us> Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2011 21:11:32 -0800 From: Ted Mittelstaedt User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101207 Thunderbird/3.1.7 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Adam Vande More 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> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit 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 05:11:36 -0000 On 1/9/2011 6:51 PM, Adam Vande More wrote: > 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 ;) > Unless Microsoft makes Hyper-V a cost item, this won't happen. The situation is like the Firefox/Internet Explorer Chinese finger trap. And VirtualBox is under the same dual GPL/proprietary licensing setup that Mysql and that Qt uses so even if Oracle stopped development on the OSE edition, some other group would pick it up. Ted