[Xen-users] FreeBSD PVHVM call for testing

[Roger Pau Monné <roger.pau@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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

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