4 ms·

I understand the different goals part, but it would be nice if these technologies could run on other BSDs (and Linux). bhyve and vmm are exclusive to FreeBSD an

by meruru 8y ago

I understand the different goals part, but it would be nice if these technologies could run on other BSDs (and Linux). bhyve and vmm are exclusive to FreeBSD and OpenBSD respectively AFAIK.

protomyth 8y ago
The second part is the plumbing is different these days. The split has gone on for a long time.
sogubsys 8y ago
From a general generic user perspective, you're right that that would be useful. As a user, I also understand that frustration. Basically, it comes down to having very little money, if any, to fund these tasks and most of the work is done by volunteers. It is much easier and faster to work with the local environment than manage kernel portability issues between different BSDs and even Linux. The cool thing is that anyone is free to help with the project and port things if they choose. It is truly an issue of funding and finding folks willing to do the work (and maintain it). It is a lot of work and specialized knowledge across different kernel domains.
- xemdetia 8y ago
  Is it wrong to have different virtualization solutions out there though? It's generally nice to know that people are trying to enhance how virtualization works on multiple platforms to suit their particular itch and we can all benefit from these different ideas being tried so we can choose the best pieces of them over time. Objectively, we want these virtualization solutions to be suited to the kernel/pipeline they are running on to give the expected behaviour and performance for the guest workload. From the end user side things like libvirt have done a lot to make the interface to these systems consistent, and so I really don't feel a ton of pain moving between virtualization solutions anymore as an end user compared to having to deal with xen/qemu/vmware/virtualbox/hyper-v incantations. If I'm just trying to run a workload I don't care about NVMM, unless it has a particular feature that I need for network emulation like say RapidIO, Fibre Channel or Infiniband as an emulated link layer.
equalunique 8y ago
> bhyve and vmm are exclusive to FreeBSD and OpenBSD respectively AFAIK. What you are saying may be true for OpenBSD/vmm, but Bhyve has been ported to Illumos, and by extension, SmartOS & OmniOS. Apple MacOS has Xhyve, which was inspired by and shares some code with FreeBSD Bhyve.

by meruru 8y ago

I understand the different goals part, but it would be nice if these technologies could run on other BSDs (and Linux). bhyve and vmm are exclusive to FreeBSD and OpenBSD respectively AFAIK.

protomyth 8y ago

The second part is the plumbing is different these days. The split has gone on for a long time.

sogubsys 8y ago

From a general generic user perspective, you're right that that would be useful. As a user, I also understand that frustration. Basically, it comes down to having very little money, if any, to fund these tasks and most of the work is done by volunteers. It is much easier and faster to work with the local environment than manage kernel portability issues between different BSDs and even Linux. The cool thing is that anyone is free to help with the project and port things if they choose. It is truly an issue of funding and finding folks willing to do the work (and maintain it). It is a lot of work and specialized knowledge across different kernel domains.

xemdetia 8y ago
Is it wrong to have different virtualization solutions out there though? It's generally nice to know that people are trying to enhance how virtualization works on multiple platforms to suit their particular itch and we can all benefit from these different ideas being tried so we can choose the best pieces of them over time. Objectively, we want these virtualization solutions to be suited to the kernel/pipeline they are running on to give the expected behaviour and performance for the guest workload. From the end user side things like libvirt have done a lot to make the interface to these systems consistent, and so I really don't feel a ton of pain moving between virtualization solutions anymore as an end user compared to having to deal with xen/qemu/vmware/virtualbox/hyper-v incantations. If I'm just trying to run a workload I don't care about NVMM, unless it has a particular feature that I need for network emulation like say RapidIO, Fibre Channel or Infiniband as an emulated link layer.

equalunique 8y ago

> bhyve and vmm are exclusive to FreeBSD and OpenBSD respectively AFAIK. What you are saying may be true for OpenBSD/vmm, but Bhyve has been ported to Illumos, and by extension, SmartOS & OmniOS. Apple MacOS has Xhyve, which was inspired by and shares some code with FreeBSD Bhyve.