In the vain hope this'll help others having this issue...

Having looked at this now for some time - and run a lot of tests, the current best solution to allow a FreeBSD domU under XenServer 6.5 to act as a gateway, or run OpenVPN (or dhcpd etc.) and remain agile - is to switch to VirtIO NIC's.

 em1000 (em) causes migrations to fail at the destination end.

Realtek (re) causes 'watchdog errors' - and if you get rid of the watchdog code from the driver, you don't see the errors - but the NIC's won't pass traffic after a migrate either.

PV (xn) have the original problem of not being able to provide routed traffic from one FreeBSD domU to other domU guests, don't work with OpenVPN (apparent 'packet size issues' from packet collation), and don't work for hosting dhcpd.

virtio (vtnet) Work for routing for other domU's, work for OpenVPN, work for dhcpd. The *only* disadvantage [aside from possibly performance] I've found is that if you migrate a PV (xn) based FreeBSD domU you suffer around 2-3 seconds of network disconnect.

With a VirtIO (vtnet) interface this can be as high as 18 seconds of network disconnect when you migrate. This means there's more of a chance of disrupting sessions that were active either on, or through the DomU. But it does work.


So until netfront is fixed (where we can hopefully go back to the undoubtedly more efficient PV 'xn' NIC's) - this is the best workaround for us - to use virtio (vtnet).

-Karl
_______________________________________________
freebsd-xen@freebsd.org mailing list
https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-xen
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-xen-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"

Reply via email to