Re: finishing up the xen port - would funding help?
Please contact the FreeBSD foundation and let them know that Amazon contacted you. The best thing to do IMHO is get Amazon and the Foundation discussing Xen related things before involving developers. Thanks, Adrian 2009/10/10 Greg Larkin glar...@freebsd.org: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Adrian Chadd wrote: Give me a few days to get stuff together here and I'll see what I can do in -head. Thanks for all your offers of support. adrian [...] Hi everyone, I received an email from a contact @ Amazon AWS yesterday asking about the status of the FreeBSD Xen project. He and I connected earlier this year after a short exchange on Twitter and some emails about getting FreeBSD AMIs running on Amazon EC2. I told him that there was a thread on the freebsd-xen mailing list in August. My understanding is that the primary blocker is funding for the developers who have the skills required to bring the Xen support up to production quality. I also figured that it might take even more time to then port to the version of Xen used by Amazon. I hope to hear back from him soon with his thoughts. Obviously, it would be extremely helpful if Amazon funded the development, presuming there would be a long-term financial gain for them. If anyone has any feedback that I should relay to him, let me know. I also asked him if he wanted contact information for the FreeBSD/Xen developers and other folks who are involved in the project at a high level. I'll post back here if he does. Best regards, Greg - -- Greg Larkin http://www.FreeBSD.org/ - The Power To Serve http://www.sourcehosting.net/ - Ready. Set. Code. http://twitter.com/sourcehosting/ - Follow me, follow you -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iD8DBQFKz+xu0sRouByUApARArKYAKCVziRDp71w977HHy2XpKxQsHgUXgCaA2fT RFxGu9dVA1s39MKn0+o6520= =Zg60 -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: finishing up the xen port - would funding help?
Greg Larkin wrote on Fri, Oct 09, 2009 at 10:07:42PM -0400: I also figured that it might take even more time to then port to the version of Xen used by Amazon. What version is that and why do they assume they are still using it when the port is finished? Martin -- %%% Martin Cracauer craca...@cons.org http://www.cons.org/cracauer/ FreeBSD - where you want to go, today. http://www.freebsd.org/ ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: finishing up the xen port - would funding help?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Adrian Chadd wrote: Give me a few days to get stuff together here and I'll see what I can do in -head. Thanks for all your offers of support. adrian [...] Hi everyone, I received an email from a contact @ Amazon AWS yesterday asking about the status of the FreeBSD Xen project. He and I connected earlier this year after a short exchange on Twitter and some emails about getting FreeBSD AMIs running on Amazon EC2. I told him that there was a thread on the freebsd-xen mailing list in August. My understanding is that the primary blocker is funding for the developers who have the skills required to bring the Xen support up to production quality. I also figured that it might take even more time to then port to the version of Xen used by Amazon. I hope to hear back from him soon with his thoughts. Obviously, it would be extremely helpful if Amazon funded the development, presuming there would be a long-term financial gain for them. If anyone has any feedback that I should relay to him, let me know. I also asked him if he wanted contact information for the FreeBSD/Xen developers and other folks who are involved in the project at a high level. I'll post back here if he does. Best regards, Greg - -- Greg Larkin http://www.FreeBSD.org/ - The Power To Serve http://www.sourcehosting.net/ - Ready. Set. Code. http://twitter.com/sourcehosting/ - Follow me, follow you -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iD8DBQFKz+xu0sRouByUApARArKYAKCVziRDp71w977HHy2XpKxQsHgUXgCaA2fT RFxGu9dVA1s39MKn0+o6520= =Zg60 -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: finishing up the xen port - would funding help?
For working on the FreeBSD DomU, what should we use for the Xen kernel and the Dom0? Most people use Linux for Dom0 I think, but I understand you can also use Solaris. I was running the bleeding edge sources for a while, and I was able to get them to work, but not well. I eventually abandoned the effort out of frustration. However we might need some changes to the Xen or to the Dom0 sources, so maybe it would be best to work with the bleeding edge. A problem I had is that I was trying to use Xen to support the development of my own cross-platform product. This machine has a RAID that contains *all* of my files, going back almost twenty years. So I was a little hesitant to boot just any kernel on it. But now I have another box, purely for experimental use, that doesn't have any manner of precious data on it. I can freely run anything on it, without fear of losing anything valuable. Mike -- Michael David Crawford m...@prgmr.com prgmr.com - We Don't Assume You Are Stupid. Xen-Powered Virtual Private Servers: http://prgmr.com/xen ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: finishing up the xen port - would funding help?
I'd suggest use whatever works. I use Centos 5.x since they use the latest stable xen patched kernel but its quite out of date. Adrian 2009/8/29 Michael David Crawford m...@prgmr.com: For working on the FreeBSD DomU, what should we use for the Xen kernel and the Dom0? Most people use Linux for Dom0 I think, but I understand you can also use Solaris. I was running the bleeding edge sources for a while, and I was able to get them to work, but not well. I eventually abandoned the effort out of frustration. However we might need some changes to the Xen or to the Dom0 sources, so maybe it would be best to work with the bleeding edge. A problem I had is that I was trying to use Xen to support the development of my own cross-platform product. This machine has a RAID that contains *all* of my files, going back almost twenty years. So I was a little hesitant to boot just any kernel on it. But now I have another box, purely for experimental use, that doesn't have any manner of precious data on it. I can freely run anything on it, without fear of losing anything valuable. Mike -- Michael David Crawford m...@prgmr.com prgmr.com - We Don't Assume You Are Stupid. Xen-Powered Virtual Private Servers: http://prgmr.com/xen ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: finishing up the xen port - would funding help?
The Xen kernel sources seem to be kept in both Mercurial and Git repositories. I've never been real clear as to which one I should use. If I want to use the development sources, but not the raw, seething, bleeding edge, which repository do I use? Can you supply an example checkout command line? The Linux Dom0 development just uses Git, I think, because that's what the mainline kernel developers use. Thanks, Mike -- Michael David Crawford m...@prgmr.com prgmr.com - We Don't Assume You Are Stupid. Xen-Powered Virtual Private Servers: http://prgmr.com/xen ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: finishing up the xen port - would funding help?
Just don't dick around with that stuff unless you're an actual developer! :) stick to a distribution you get support from. I'd suggest CentOS. Centos/redhat are at least caring about Xen PVM/HVM support. Ubuntu for example seems to really only care about KVM these days. No idea about the rest. Adrian 2009/8/29 Michael David Crawford m...@prgmr.com: The Xen kernel sources seem to be kept in both Mercurial and Git repositories. I've never been real clear as to which one I should use. If I want to use the development sources, but not the raw, seething, bleeding edge, which repository do I use? Can you supply an example checkout command line? The Linux Dom0 development just uses Git, I think, because that's what the mainline kernel developers use. Thanks, Mike -- Michael David Crawford m...@prgmr.com prgmr.com - We Don't Assume You Are Stupid. Xen-Powered Virtual Private Servers: http://prgmr.com/xen ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: finishing up the xen port - would funding help?
Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org writes: I'd suggest use whatever works. I use Centos 5.x since they use the latest stable xen patched kernel but its quite out of date. If you want to make FreeBSD also run under the 3.0.3/3.1 hypervisor that CentOS/RHEL use, that's great (I think ec2 uses the RHEL/CentOS foo, but that is hersay.) the newer Xen hypervisors all seem to support DomUs that expect 3.0.3 hypervisors, so we should be good. The RHEL5 installations will be out there for a while, and 'yum install xen' is by far the easiest way to get a working Dom0. Prgmr.com uses a xen.org 2.6.18.8-xen (the one that comes with Xen 3.4) kernel and toolset on top of a CentOS 5 userland right now. I moved off of the CentOS kernel because until recently it did not support paravirt_ops DomUs, and the RHEL Xen kernels are slightly less stable than the xen.org kernels. RedHat has made it quite clear that they intend to replace all instances of xen with KVM. So yeah, for me personally, I see NetBSD 5 as the 'way forward' in terms of Dom0 operating systems, now that RedHat has publically stated that KVM should replace Xen in RedHat products (which is weird, because as far as I can see, while both are fine products, they are not even remotely substitutable. KVM would be a silly idea for prgmr.com to use for hosting, and Xen doesn't make sense if you just need to spin up a dev box every now and then.) Currently NetBSD uses the Xen 3.3 hypervisor, and it supports modern hardware. (really, the 2.6.18.8-xen kernel from xen.org, which I currently use in production is mostly okay, especially as the socket F boards havent changed in some time.) I started with FreeBSD Jails, and moved to NetBSD/xen2, and only left because of the ram limit. Now that NetBSD 5 is out, I think it's time for me to switch back. ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: finishing up the xen port - would funding help?
Adrian Chadd wrote: Just don't dick around with that stuff unless you're an actual developer! :) stick to a distribution you get support from. I'd suggest CentOS. I'm concerned that the FreeBSD support might need patches made to the Xen kernel or to the various Dom0s. If that were the case, we really would be wanting to run the development code. When I was working with Xen a few months ago, the development code had all kinds of stuff in it that wasn't available in any of the releases. Mike -- Michael David Crawford m...@prgmr.com prgmr.com - We Don't Assume You Are Stupid. Xen-Powered Virtual Private Servers: http://prgmr.com/xen ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: finishing up the xen port - would funding help?
The -head xen stuff I was testing worked fine with the out-of-box Xen hypervisor shipped with CentOS 5.3. That is what I'm using to do development against at the moment. Adrian 2009/8/29 Michael David Crawford m...@prgmr.com: Adrian Chadd wrote: Just don't dick around with that stuff unless you're an actual developer! :) stick to a distribution you get support from. I'd suggest CentOS. I'm concerned that the FreeBSD support might need patches made to the Xen kernel or to the various Dom0s. If that were the case, we really would be wanting to run the development code. When I was working with Xen a few months ago, the development code had all kinds of stuff in it that wasn't available in any of the releases. Mike -- Michael David Crawford m...@prgmr.com prgmr.com - We Don't Assume You Are Stupid. Xen-Powered Virtual Private Servers: http://prgmr.com/xen ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: finishing up the xen port - would funding help?
I started with FreeBSD Jails, and moved to NetBSD/xen2, and only left because of the ram limit. Now that NetBSD 5 is out, I think it's time for me to switch back. what stops me from that path is that disk pool flexibility is a bit limited on netbsd. zfs or lvm let me slop disk space to domUs as they need it. randy ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: finishing up the xen port - would funding help?
Randy Bush ra...@psg.com writes: I started with FreeBSD Jails, and moved to NetBSD/xen2, and only left because of the ram limit. Now that NetBSD 5 is out, I think it's time for me to switch back. what stops me from that path is that disk pool flexibility is a bit limited on netbsd. zfs or lvm let me slop disk space to domUs as they need it. what about the tap: driver and friends? qcow:?(these are issues I will need to figure out) LVM snapshots are so slow that I find them unsuable, so I'm not really losing much by moving to the tap: driver (granted, I am pushing my disks to the limit. lvm snapshots work fine if your disks are lightly loaded and/or faster than mine.) ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: finishing up the xen port - would funding help?
what about the tap: driver and friends? qcow:?(these are issues I will need to figure out) LVM snapshots are so slow that I find them unsuable, so I'm not really losing much by moving to the tap: driver (granted, I am pushing my disks to the limit. lvm snapshots work fine if your disks are lightly loaded and/or faster than mine.) If I can ask, how does Prgmr.com allocate disk space to domu's? qcow? also does anyone know if a NetBSD 5 or CURRENT dom0 can migrate domu's between 2 NetBSD Dom0's ? Migration and ZFS is what I am waiting for NetBSD to have. Sam Fourman Jr. ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: finishing up the xen port - would funding help?
Give me a few days to get stuff together here and I'll see what I can do in -head. Thanks for all your offers of support. adrian 2009/8/26 Michael David Crawford m...@prgmr.com: Luke S Crawford wrote: I could also scrape up some cash. (unfortunately, my own budget isn't as flush as it was a few months ago, when I tried to set one of my friends on the project.) That friend would be me (no relation). I'm afraid I didn't get very far at the time, in part because I had a lot of trouble coming to grips with Xen, and because I had never done any FreeBSD kernel programming before. I would be happy to continue with the work as a volunteer. I'd like to actually contribute some real code so as to finally earn all the money Luke paid me. I've been reading McKusick's book on The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System. It is very good; I expect I will be able to do some meaningful kernel hacking once I finish reading it. I gave up on Xen entirely for a while, as I had intended to use it for a project of my own but just couldn't get it to do what I need. But the Xen kernel and Linux Dom0 continue to be actively developed, so I'm intending to give it another try. I do have experience with kernel and driver programming on Mac OS X and with embedded systems. I am also a wizard at debugging - I was once on a team at Apple that specialized in fixing the most difficult bugs in the Classic Mac OS. I have also done a lot of storage and FireWire work. I have a Core 2 Quad Xeon box that runs Fedora 11, as well as a Core 2 Duo box that Luke lent me, that runs FreeBSD CURRENT. My intention for that box has been to learn FreeBSD kernel hacking by fixing some of the existing bugs on real hardware. That's just a step in the process of learning how to hack FreeBSD's DomU support. Ever Faithful, Mike -- Michael David Crawford m...@prgmr.com prgmr.com - We Don't Assume You Are Stupid. Xen-Powered Virtual Private Servers: http://prgmr.com/xen ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: finishing up the xen port - would funding help?
Hi, i guess a lot of us feel the same (mainly sadness) about the progress here and a lot of us have to feed penguins meanwhile... I personally think, that the virtualization technology in general is one of the key technologies of tomorrow and therefore it makes me even more sad, that FreeBSD fell back that much these days (years!). Therefore i ask myself whether this should be a major project in general and maybe the best way to push it (along with all the administrative and longterm problem) might be to get support from the FreeBSD Foundation, which successfully enabled Java for BSD some months ago (another key technology as i think). Otherwise it is very unprobably (in my eyes) that the little daemon ever will be playing in the ongoing cloud game and everything behind, which IS and WOULD BE a shame! Maybe some of the core ppl can raise awareness here? Best Kai - Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org schrieb: Including me, as a developer. adrian 2009/8/22 Randy Bush ra...@psg.com: 2) Individual monetary contributions cannot be by default handled by some proxy person (without much legal footwork); they will need to go directly from the source to the developer. a number of us have legal business fronts that could be used in pass-through mode. let's not worry about administrivia. randy ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: finishing up the xen port - would funding help?
The best thing users can do is -tell- the FreeBSD foundation that they're interested in this and in what way they're interested. If you're a company that is or would like to be deploying FreeBSD on Xen, you should also do this. Adrian 2009/8/24 Kai Mosebach x...@komadev.de: Hi, i guess a lot of us feel the same (mainly sadness) about the progress here and a lot of us have to feed penguins meanwhile... I personally think, that the virtualization technology in general is one of the key technologies of tomorrow and therefore it makes me even more sad, that FreeBSD fell back that much these days (years!). Therefore i ask myself whether this should be a major project in general and maybe the best way to push it (along with all the administrative and longterm problem) might be to get support from the FreeBSD Foundation, which successfully enabled Java for BSD some months ago (another key technology as i think). Otherwise it is very unprobably (in my eyes) that the little daemon ever will be playing in the ongoing cloud game and everything behind, which IS and WOULD BE a shame! Maybe some of the core ppl can raise awareness here? Best Kai - Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org schrieb: Including me, as a developer. adrian 2009/8/22 Randy Bush ra...@psg.com: 2) Individual monetary contributions cannot be by default handled by some proxy person (without much legal footwork); they will need to go directly from the source to the developer. a number of us have legal business fronts that could be used in pass-through mode. let's not worry about administrivia. randy ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: finishing up the xen port - would funding help?
I've kept quiet, but I wonder why we're feeding penguins for dom0, when netbsd has dom0 support since 4.0 i need the file system flexibility of zfs. nothing in netbsd. penguin has lvm, which gets a lot of what one needs. randy ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: finishing up the xen port - would funding help?
count me in for a few hundred. two things needed, someone to gather the cash and kip to show willingness. randy ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: finishing up the xen port - would funding help?
Florian Heigl florian.he...@gmail.com writes: for over 3 years we're now looking at a mostly-working, breaking, half-working port, breaking, half-working of FreeBSD to xen. personally I think this is a very sad state, especially considering how well FreeBSD (-current, with patches) worked in Xen 2. I wonder if starting a fundraiser (like the ones initiated by rsync.net) might help this problem. I think we would have to scratch up enough for a month of kip's (or someone else's) time to see everything addressed and the xen patches finally being merged in a sane way like NetBSD did it. I see lots of interest... if money and/or hardware helps, I can scratch up some myself, and I'd be happy to help flog the idea to others. I could commit to donating a core2 server with 8GiB ram and 2 disks, along with hosting if you need it with rebooter and serial (or I could ship the server to someone) plus a whole bunch of Linux dom0 servers you could test out DomUs on. I could also scrape up some cash. (unfortunately, my own budget isn't as flush as it was a few months ago, when I tried to set one of my friends on the project.) I'd also be happy to try to talk my competitors into helping the effort (us Xen hosting providers probably have more financial interest in paravirtualized FreeBSD support than anyone else, also donating to this sort of thing is good advertising.) So is anyone up for the coding task? Who? and how much money do we need to come up with to get this done?(If it helps fundrasing, I'd be more than happy to give anyone who donates money to the cause $1 in credit towards renting FreeBSD Xen DomUs on my system for every $1 they donate towards coding the project up.) I'm sure there are many others willing to kick in, and I know I'd certainly be willing to do some legwork to find some of that money, I think if we had someone like Kip put a number on it, we could reach that number. -- Luke S. Crawford http://prgmr.com/xen/ - Hosting for the technically adept http://nostarch.com/xen.htm - We don't assume you are stupid. ___ freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
