freebsd stable - Dec 2010 - Virtio drivers for FreeBSD on KVM

Hi everyone,

With more cloud infrastructure providers using KVM than ever before, the
importance of having FreeBSD performant as a guest on these
infrastructures [1], [2], [3] is increasing. It seems that using Virtio
drivers give a pretty significant performance boost [4], [5].

There was a NetBSD driver, and there seems to (have been) some work
happening to port this to DragonFly BSD at [6] and [7] -- does anyone
know if this code is stable, or if it has stalled, or if anyone's
working on it?

It may be possible to use the work done on the Xen paravirtualised
network and disk drivers, combined with the NetBSD code, as starting
point for an implementation?

My company might soon be in a position to sponsor the work to get this
completed and available at some point in FreeBSD 8. I'd be very
interested to hear from anyone who's involved, or who might like to be.

-- 
Best Regards,
Luke Marsden
CTO, Hybrid Logic Ltd.

Web: http://www.hybrid-cluster.com/
Hybrid Web Cluster - cloud web hosting

Mobile: +447791750420


[1] http://www.elastichosts.com/
[2] http://www.cloudsigma.com/
[3] http://beta.brightbox.com/
[4] http://arstechnica.com/civs/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=34039
[5] blog.loftninjas.org/2008/10/22/kvm-virtio-network-performance/
[6] kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/dragonflybsd-kernel/2010/10/23/6884356
[7] http://gitorious.org/virtio-drivers

> With more cloud infrastructure providers using KVM than ever before, the
> importance of having FreeBSD performant as a guest on these
> infrastructures [1], [2], [3] is increasing. It seems that using Virtio
> drivers give a pretty significant performance boost [4], [5].
>
> There was a NetBSD driver, and there seems to (have been) some work
> happening to port this to DragonFly BSD at [6] and [7] -- does anyone
> know if this code is stable, or if it has stalled, or if anyone's
> working on it?
Are the virtio devices provided by Linux KVM the same as those
provided by VirtualBox ? Certainly their website says that the
networking one is. How about giving the drivers provided by
/usr/ports/emulators/virtualbox-ose-additions a try and see
if they will work with KVM ?

-pete.

Actually, it does look like virtio is more than just for
networking...

http://vbox.innotek.de/pipermail/vbox-dev/2009-November/002053.html