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Date:      Tue, 23 Jan 2001 23:04:29 -0600
From:      "Michael C . Wu" <keichii@iteration.net>
To:        "Bruce R. Montague Brucem" <brucem@mx.cruzio.com>
Cc:        freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: virtual hypervisor clusters
Message-ID:  <20010123230429.C88688@peorth.iteration.net>
In-Reply-To: <200101240302.TAA00860@mx.cruzio.com>; from brucem@mx.cruzio.com on Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 07:02:15PM -0800
References:  <200101240302.TAA00860@mx.cruzio.com>

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On Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 07:02:15PM -0800, Bruce R. Montague Brucem scribbled:
| This is a speculative "freebsd-cluster" newbie type
| question. I hope "-net" is appropriate.
| 
| A couple of us, over beer, were pondering clusters,
| virtual machines, VM/370 hypervisors/networks,
| emulators, JIT's, jails, dummynet, netgraph, etc..

You want the IBM virtual machine stuff...

| Does anyone have a way to run multiple PC emulators,
| each running FreeBSD (of course) on a single FreeBSD
| machine? And then cluster the virtual machines using
| a virtual network driver/simulator? The intent here
| is to literally run multiple TCP/IP stacks (albeit
| at non-real-time simulation rates) and simulate a
   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^Slower or faster?

Look on merit.edu or IETF archives, they funded 
projects like this before.

| wide variety of media in the ``network'' virtual
| device on the real machine. That is, the typical
| network research problem (or VM wannabe).

You wish to emulate a real life network within
one single computer.  Having too many nodes would
effectively forkbomb yourself.  I have seen a
course in TCP/IP protocol design that does this with
their home grown code.  I will ask them if they 
can allow the code to be released.

| For this to actually work at any semi-realistic
| speed, the PC emulators would probably have to be
| truly `hypervisor-like', that is, basically run
| non-privileged code pretty much at regular instruction
| rates, and just take the emulation hit for non-privileged
| code/operations. The 32-bit x86 is still probably
| a good way from true virtualizability(?), but...

You can improve jail enough to do this.  Or you can
implement many many netgraph nodes that does the 
basic TCP/IP protocols.

| Have any network research/simulation folks done such
| things using PC VMs? What is the best performance
| that has been achieved using PC emulators capable
| of running FreeBSD?

Not with PC, I have only seen Sparc/MIPS/RISC/6000 platforms
with high-end computing power.  And the reason was stated
earlier (re: forkbomb).

| Any relevant advice appreciated, however, only open
| source solutions are likely helpful, other than as
| existence proofs.

I know several commercial solutions exist, other than that,
no can do.
-- 
+------------------------------------------------------------------+
| keichii@peorth.iteration.net         | keichii@bsdconspiracy.net |
| http://peorth.iteration.net/~keichii | Yes, BSD is a conspiracy. |
+------------------------------------------------------------------+


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