Re: Xen Status : FreeBSD-current as Dom/U.

On 10/28/07, Kevin Schmidt <kps_at_ucsb.edu> wrote:
> On Thursday 25 October 2007, Erik Osterholm wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 26, 2007 at 05:06:49AM +0900, Harrison Grundy wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2007-10-25 at 12:05 +0200, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> > > > "Vincent Blondel" <vincent_at_xtra-net.org> writes:
> > > > > Can somebody indicate me what settings I have to include in
> > > > > GENERIC config file so to compile a Xen Dom/U FreeBSD kernel.
> > > >
> > > > FreeBSD currently does not support running under Xen.
> > >
> > > I just thought I'd note that you can use Xen with FreeBSD if your
> > > processor supports hardware virtualization, I believe.
> >
> > I have yet to hear any independant verification of this.  Anyone
> > actually running FreeBSD as a domU with hardware virtualization?
>
> FWIW, I've tried FreeBSD as an HVM guest on several Linux distros as
> Dom0, Xen 3.0 (3.0.3, 3.0.4) and 3.1 (3.1.0), using Xen packages and
> manual compiles.  Linux distros included Ubuntu 7.04 and Debian 4.
> FreeBSD 6.2 and 7.0 -- release and snapshots -- consistently fail to
> boot with a looping "BTX halted" and register dump.  If there's a way
> to install stock FreeBSD under Xen HVM, I haven't seen it.  Without
> saying whether this is properly a Xen problem or FBSD BTX problem, my
> guess is this type of installation will not work until there are BTX
> changes.

It is obviously inadequate emulation on HVM's part. It would be
interesting to see how this fared on SVM, but on VT-x one needs to
emulate real mode and what exists there now is somewhat limited. This
worked very briefly a few years ago. HVM's primary target is running
windows.

 -Kip