porting virtualbox or qemu-kvm

Predrag Punosevac punosevac72 at gmail.com
Fri Jun 20 16:39:18 PDT 2014


Wojciech Puchar wrote:

> are there plans to do this?
> 
> This is the only reason i did not yet updated all production machines to
>
> DFLy and they run FreeBSD-10.
>
> I usually need few small VMs to run most often very old software.

DragonFly BSD ecosystem is tiny comparing to FreeBSD which in turn is
tiny comparing to Linux. Since I am not a developer my opinion is not
important but think that one should be very careful committing such a
tiny resources to any non essential project.

VirtualBox is a toy and as such has limited useful value beyond running
Windows instance on your desktop so that you can use IE to verify if the
web software you just developed works for your customers. We run it in
our lab for exactly such purposes. Building VirtualBox on FreeBSD is a
pain in the rear end and I could not think of a single advantage of
running VirtualBox on FreeBSD as oppose to native Linux platform (in
particular in the light of your earlier comments about ZFS).

KVM is much more useful but acceleration is Linux kernel specific. I
have not toyed enough with SmartOS to see how KVM works on Solaris
kernel but as someone who runs upward of 15 productions KVM instances it
would be very hard to convince me that I should not be using Red Hat as
a KVM host. You can try :) qemu without kernel acceleration has no value
IMHO.


I think I speak for many people on this list if I say that there is
nothing that should make me more happy than to see Hummer2 production
ready. However if somebody has itchy fingers, time on her/his hands,
and brain power the proper look into the Jail infrastructure would be
very welcome. There has been lots of progress made on FreeBSD jail
infrastructure since DragonFly was forked but even vanilla FreeBSD users
could find things like Warden ported from PCBSD/TrueOS very useful.
That I would really like to see on DragonFly.

Cheers,
Predrag




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