From owner-freebsd-virtualization@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Jan 22 22:15:49 2014 Return-Path: Delivered-To: virtualization@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [8.8.178.115]) (using TLSv1 with cipher ADH-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id B3FFC8CC for ; Wed, 22 Jan 2014 22:15:49 +0000 (UTC) Received: from bigwig.baldwin.cx (bigwig.baldwin.cx [IPv6:2001:470:1f11:75::1]) (using TLSv1 with cipher ADH-CAMELLIA256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 8E3981975 for ; Wed, 22 Jan 2014 22:15:49 +0000 (UTC) Received: from jhbbsd.localnet (unknown [209.249.190.124]) by bigwig.baldwin.cx (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id A1D8CB93B for ; Wed, 22 Jan 2014 17:15:45 -0500 (EST) From: John Baldwin To: virtualization@freebsd.org Subject: bhyve and legacy Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2014 17:15:42 -0500 User-Agent: KMail/1.13.5 (FreeBSD/8.4-CBSD-20130906; KDE/4.5.5; amd64; ; ) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <201401221715.42164.jhb@freebsd.org> X-Greylist: Sender succeeded SMTP AUTH, not delayed by milter-greylist-4.2.7 (bigwig.baldwin.cx); Wed, 22 Jan 2014 17:15:45 -0500 (EST) X-BeenThere: freebsd-virtualization@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.17 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: Wed, 22 Jan 2014 22:15:49 -0000 Is there any interest in supporting more "legacy" setups via bhyve? In particular, I'd like to take a whack at improving the PCI INTx support, but that can involve several things such as possibly implementing 8259A support and a PCI interrupt router vs always assuming that we have APICs. If we do want to support a more legacy route, is there interest in supporting a BIOS interface in the VM? I know that one option is to go grab a BIOS ROM from something like qemu, but another option is to have the real-mode IDT vector to stub routines in a very small ROM that traps to the hypervisor to implement BIOS requests. OTOH, that may turn out to be rather messy. Finally, I noticed a comment fly by about removing the need for bhyveload. One thing I have found useful recently is passing -H to bhyveload. Specifically, I can build a test kernel outside of the VM on the host and access it via the host0 filesystem in bhyveload so I can easily test kernels in the VM while still using the host as my development environment. It would be nice to retain this ability in some fashion. -- John Baldwin