“One of the areas where Linux has rapidly progressed is in the field of virtualization. Among the virtualization options are Xen, QEMU, QEMU with KVM, and VMWare. With Fedora 7 it’s so easy to use KVM virtualization that you can start virtualizing your favorite operating system and barely even touch the keyboard! In this guide we will tell you how as we work on virtualizing a battery of operating systems from Microsoft Windows Vista to Mandrake 9.2.”
Is there anything like KVM for FreeBSD or any other xBSDs? I think this might be the killer app for Linux. I have setup Xen on BSDs and between having to to install the base kernel and switching between domain0 and then the elaborate process of setting up dom0, the KVM process (if it can measure up to Xen – even if not to 100% performance) will be very enticing.
After running almost serveral dozens of servers on FreeBSD, we are investigating Linux KVM right now and must say its quite impressive. If VT/Pacifica optimizations go into KVM in the next version, I don’t think there would be much difference between it and Xen Full Virtualization.
It would be nice if FreeBSD would have something like this. They’ve been having quite a time porting Xen to dom0 as it is.
Is there anything like KVM for FreeBSD or any other xBSDs? I think this might be the killer app for Linux.
Well, there’s no technical reason that I know of that would prevent hardware-assisted full virtualization to be implemented in this way on BSD. I don’t see this as a “killer app” for Linux. If there is such a thing, it’s the vast development community with extremely diverse interests that brings these sorts of technologies to reality. In your case, you might want to keep your workloads on FreeBSD (domU) and just switch to a Linux dom0 running Xen or KVM.
If VT/Pacifica optimizations go into KVM in the next version, I don’t think there would be much difference between it and Xen Full Virtualization.
I was under the impression that KVM explicitly requires and makes use of the VT-x and SVM extensions. I could be wrong (wouldn’t be the first time). KVM should perform approximately the same as Xen in full virtualization mode, since both are using the same underlying approach. However, KVM shouldn’t be considered quite as mature as Xen at this point. Xen also offers paravirtualization for domUs that support it, which will provide a significant performance advantage.
Generic interfaces for both hardware-assisted full virtualization and paravirtualization are now natively supported for x86/x64 in the Linux kernel, as well as UML (Linux on Linux “para-paravirtualization”) and VServer (OS-level virtualization) for most architectures. Patches for OpenVZ (another OS-level solution) are easy to find. An instance of Linux (and whatever you want to run on it) can also run as a native task on System Z mainframes, which is about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. This is almost solely responsible for reinvigorating the mainframe.
Virtualization is about freeing software from the hardware lock-in, so it’s no wonder that free software has embraced virtualization whole-heartedly.
maybe try Kqemu/qemu for BSD? I’m not sure what the difference between it and KVM are any longer in terms of performance.
Edited 2007-03-04 08:48
Oh man. I just tried this out, and it was far easier than my last trials with VMware and standard qemu. The fact that it can also easily make use of VT/Pacifica makes it even spiffy, since now I can run Win XP as a decent-performance guest (don’t mock me – I need it for school at times, unfortunately…).
THANK YOU RED HAT DEVS!!
Edited 2007-03-04 08:53