FreeBSD Xen Roger Pau Monn?? royger@FreeBSD.org Wei Liu wei.liu2@citrix.com FreeBSD PVH DomU wiki page FreeBSD PVH Dom0 wiki page FreeBSD/Xen HVMlite implementation

Xen is a hypervisor using a microkernel design, providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently. Xen support for FreeBSD on x86 as a guest was introduced in version 8 and ARM support is currently being worked on. Support for running FreeBSD as an amd64 Xen host (Dom0) is available in HEAD.

Regarding x86, the work during this quarter has been focused in rewriting the PVH implementation inside of Xen, to what is now being called HVMlite (in order to differentiate it with the previous PVH implementation). The Xen side of patches have already been committed to the Xen source tree, and will be available in Xen 4.7 (the next version). Work has also started on implementing HVMlite Dom0 support, although no patches have yet been published.

HVMlite support for FreeBSD has not yet been committed, although an initial implementation is available in a personal git repository (listed in the links section). The plan is to completely replace PVH with HVMlite on FreeBSD as soon as HVMlite supports Dom0 mode.

Apart from this, Wei Liu is working on improving netfront performance on FreeBSD, initial patches have been posted on the FreeBSD review system.

During this time frame the x86 unmapped bounce buffer code has also been improved and unmapped IO support has been added to blkfront.

Citrix Systems R&D Finish HVMlite Dom0 support inside of Xen. Deprecate and remove PVH support from Xen. Remove PVH support from FreeBSD and switch to HVMlite. Generalize the event channel code so it can be used on ARM. Improve backends (netback, blkback) performance.