Xen users - May 2013 - Re: [Xen-devel] FreeBSD PVHVM call for testing

On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 08:32:56PM +0200, Roger Pau Monné
wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Recently Justin T Gibbs, Will Andrews and myself have been working on
> improving the Xen support in FreeBSD. The main goal of this was to bring
> full PVHVM support to FreeBSD, right now FreeBSD is only using PV
> interfaces for disk and network interfaces when running as a HVM guest.
> The main benefits of this changes are that Xen virtual interrupts (event
> channels) are now delivered to the guest using a vector callback
> injection, that is a per-cpu mechanism that allows each vCPU to have
> different interrupts assigned, so for example network and disk
> interrupts are delivered to different vCPUs in order to improve
> performance. With this changes FreeBSD also uses PV timers when running
> as an HVM guest, which should provide better time keeping and reduce the
> virtualization overhead, since emulated timers are no longer used. PV
> IPIs can also be used inside a HVM guest, but this will be implemented
> later.
> 
> Right now the code is in a state where it can be tested by users, so we
> would like to encourage FreeBSD and Xen users to test it and provide
> feedback.
> 
> The code is available in the following git repository, under the branch
> pvhvm_v5:
> 
> http://xenbits.xen.org/gitweb/?p=people/royger/freebsd.git;a=summary
> 
> Also, I''ve created a wiki page that explains how to set up a
FreeBSD
> PVHVM for testing:
> 
> http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Testing_FreeBSD_PVHVM
I tried on my Linux box to do this:


HEAD is now at 9b25356... xen-netfront: fix detach of network interfaces
konrad@phenom:~/git/freebsd$ make kernel-toolchain && make buildkernel
KERNCONF=XENHVM && make installkernel KERNCONF=XENHVM
Makefile:123: *** missing separator.  Stop.


As I thought it would compile the same way you can compile NetBSD - that is
even on non-BSD distros. Is that not the case? Should I only do this under
a FreeBSD guest?