Xen support in DragonFlyBSD and donation of one VPS for development

[Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado]

Hi. I've been using DragonFlyBSD for years and I like a lot (the system, 
pkgsrc and the community) but I can't to use your OS in something 
important for me. My Xen VPS.

I'm a sysadmin and I can't code the Xen support because my lack of 
knowledge. I would like know if anyone has interest in working in the 
Xen DomU support for DragonFlyBSD or in mentoring to students with 
interest in this area.

Now a student is working in Virtio. KVM is great but isn't the solution 
for all cases. In hosting industry Xen is the king and is superior to 
KVM in many cases.

The roadmap would be:
- Support for Xen DomU in kernel
- Drivers for Xen DomU PV
- Tools for to create a image with the installer for Xen
- A little image with the installer
NetBSD and FreeBSD have Xen DomU support. NetBSD also has a few images 
with the installer, essential for VPS and useful for other use case.

I know is very difficult to work in something without access to real 
hardware. In the last night I wrote to my hosting provider requesting
a donation of a VPS to the developer that accept to work in Xen support. 
He said: "That would be really great!".

He is Luke S. Crawford, the owner of prgmr ( http://prgmr.com ) and 
co-author of "The Book of Xen" ( http://nostarch.com/xen.htm ). Prgmr is 
a BSD friendly hosting provider and you can find to Luke in a lot of 
mailing lists.

At first the developer will need only the minimum requirements for to 
boot DragonFlyBSD (128MB? 256MB?) but for the future development the 
developer will have a 512MB VPS. If you need more please let me know.

The environment is a standard de facto in hosting industry. The boot 
manager is pvgrub and it's very easy to setup for to run various 
systems. You will have a external ssh console for to control your VPS 
and unrestricted root access.

You can find real code with Xen DomU support in:
- NetBSD http://www.netbsd.org/ports/xen/ . My idea is to have a image 
with the installer and Xen DomU support like in NetBSD.
- FreeBSD http://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/Xen . It's not useful for 
users without access to Dom0 because they haven't a image with the 
installer.
- Xen.org and http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/ .
- Linux kernel mainline.

Anyone is interested? :)

PD: sorry for my english.

--
Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado <iam at juanfra.info> http://juanfra.info