Re: Xen support in DragonFlyBSD and donation of one VPS for development

[Dean Hamstead <dean@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

hi there

xen is dominant in vps's but its hardly superior. ibm and redhat have both abandoned leaving it as a kernel fork with limited major developers, it whilst kvm has been merged in to the mainline linux kernel.

virtio has also been adopted by virtualbox, so virtio drivers would cover two virt technologies.

the main restriction for vps providers is that the kvm support in happy commercial vps gui software is very limited at thus stage.

on the other hand private cloud software is heavily falling behind kvm.

also, openbsd has vmware drivers now. which could be merged.

my 2c


D


On 27/06/2011, at 4:02 AM, Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado <iam@juanfra.info> wrote:

> Hi. I've been using DragonFlyBSD for years and I like a lot (the system, pkgsrc and the community) but I can't to use your OS in something important for me. My Xen VPS.
> 
> I'm a sysadmin and I can't code the Xen support because my lack of knowledge. I would like know if anyone has interest in working in the Xen DomU support for DragonFlyBSD or in mentoring to students with interest in this area.
> 
> Now a student is working in Virtio. KVM is great but isn't the solution for all cases. In hosting industry Xen is the king and is superior to KVM in many cases.
> 
> The roadmap would be:
> - Support for Xen DomU in kernel
> - Drivers for Xen DomU PV
> - Tools for to create a image with the installer for Xen
> - A little image with the installer
> 
> NetBSD and FreeBSD have Xen DomU support. NetBSD also has a few images with the installer, essential for VPS and useful for other use case.
> 
> I know is very difficult to work in something without access to real hardware. In the last night I wrote to my hosting provider requesting
> a donation of a VPS to the developer that accept to work in Xen support. He said: "That would be really great!".
> 
> He is Luke S. Crawford, the owner of prgmr ( http://prgmr.com ) and co-author of "The Book of Xen" ( http://nostarch.com/xen.htm ). Prgmr is a BSD friendly hosting provider and you can find to Luke in a lot of mailing lists.
> 
> At first the developer will need only the minimum requirements for to boot DragonFlyBSD (128MB? 256MB?) but for the future development the developer will have a 512MB VPS. If you need more please let me know.
> 
> The environment is a standard de facto in hosting industry. The boot manager is pvgrub and it's very easy to setup for to run various systems. You will have a external ssh console for to control your VPS and unrestricted root access.
> 
> You can find real code with Xen DomU support in:
> - NetBSD http://www.netbsd.org/ports/xen/ . My idea is to have a image with the installer and Xen DomU support like in NetBSD.
> - FreeBSD http://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/Xen . It's not useful for users without access to Dom0 because they haven't a image with the installer.
> - Xen.org and http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/ .
> - Linux kernel mainline.
> 
> Anyone is interested? :)
> 
> PD: sorry for my english.
> 
> -- 
> Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado <iam@juanfra.info> http://juanfra.info