xhyve vs bhyve diffs ?

[George Neville-Neil]

On 17 Oct 2016, at 9:55, Luigi Rizzo wrote:

> Hi,
> I have been looking at the diffs between bhyve and xhyve and I am a 
> bit
> puzzled on the porting approach.
>
> The diff (in the main code; some files are renamed) is about 7000 
> lines,
> but excluding context there are about 1500 deleted and 1500 added 
> lines
> (not 1-1 replacements; there are sections of code removed from bhyve,
> and some extra functions/wrappers added in xhyve).
>
> Of them, the vast majority of changes fits in the following 
> categories:
>
> 350 #includes, #pragma, assert and comments
> 250 removal of the 'ctx' argument
> 400 missing casts (the default build flags on OSX are more strict)
>
> The remaining set of changes is very small (probably less than 500
> true lines of code, scattered around).
>
> Is there any interest in reducing the diffs (I have starting doing 
> some
> of it, but it does not make sense if there is no agreement that this
> is a useful goal).
>
> This requires some effort on the xhyve side (some of the xhyve changes
> above are completely gratuitous), but also some work on the FreeBSD
> side e.g. to use more appropriate data types and/or casts.
>

I am only a user of xhyve but I'd definitely test and push to my own 
repo any changes you have.  I can then popularize those and try to 
involve the original porter of the code.   The general approach of 
making xhyve/bhyve closer and more similar seems like a good one to me.  
Having a good, BSD licensed, VM solution on FreeBSD and OS X (oh, sorry 
macOS whatever) seems like a fine idea.

Best,
George