Boot FreeBSD 10 in HVM mode under Xen?

[Roger Pau Monné]

El 31/07/15 a les 16.38, Karl Pielorz ha escrit:
> 
> 
> --On 31 July 2015 16:17 +0200 Roger Pau Monné <roger.pau at citrix.com> wrote:
> 
>> This is a bug then. You should be able to boot without XENHVM/xenpci,
>> and get a pure HVM guest with no PV devices at all.
> 
> I'm just setting up another less critical system to reproduce it. To
> confirm, I just take GENERIC and remove 'XENHVM' and 'xenpci', and it
> should boot without PV.
> 
> I'll post the results / panic & exact versions when I get it (though
> some goes off the top of the console = could be interesting).

Could you setup the serial console on FreeBSD following:

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/serialconsole-setup.html

Then add serial='pty' to your config file and create the domain using
`xl create -c <config_file>`. This way you can get the full serial output.

> 
>> Since this seems to be getting quite popular (booting without PV
>> devices), I think adding a sysctl to disable PV nics and PV hard drives
>> would be interesting. We could still use some of the PV goodies, like
>> the timer.
> 
> Can you technically have a system that has HVM network (i.e. realtek)
> but still has disk PV, and/or is agile? (i.e. can run xen-tools)?
> 
> That'd kind of be a 'perfect' workaround for all our network woes
> (openvpn, routing etc.) at the moment - even if the performance of HVM
> re0 isn't as good as a PV xn0

Yes, this is certainly possible. IIRC I posted a patch to the
freebsd-xen mailing list in order to do that. I will try to find/refresh
it and post it again so you can try it. It might have to wait until
Monday however, since I'm quite busy today.

Roger.