Hi,
today I've tried to install OpenBSD3.9 as a HVM guest on XenEnterprise
3.2Beta (http://www.xensource.com/) and it turned out to work without
severe problems. The rtl8139 emulation seems to work well, though it
gave me one or two watchdog timeouts at the end of the boot process.
Here are the results of a quick-and-dirty netio test I've done:
(physical NIC of both client and server was 1GBit, Xen-based OpenBSD
runs the server part of netio)
NETIO - Network Throughput Benchmark, Version 1.26
(C) 1997-2005 Kai Uwe Rommel
TCP connection established.
Packet size 1k bytes: 2012 KByte/s Tx, 1512 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 2k bytes: 2546 KByte/s Tx, 1651 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 4k bytes: 2525 KByte/s Tx, 2194 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 8k bytes: 2692 KByte/s Tx, 2161 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 16k bytes: 2880 KByte/s Tx, 2202 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 32k bytes: 3032 KByte/s Tx, 2299 KByte/s Rx.
Done.
It has to be mentioned that the CPU usage on the virtual OpenBSD machine
went up to nearly 100% while this benchmark was running, so this type of
installation is obviously not suitable for heavy workloads.
The scrambled screen problem still exists but has gotten much better
since my last try with an older version of XenEnterprise. At least it's
now possible to install OpenBSD with nearly no "unreadable because of
too scrambled" events.
BTW: Though XenEnterprise is a commercial product, there's a free
version with limited features available too.
Christoph
(In no way related to XenSource...)
