[Ukfreebsd] Recap: FreeBSD developer summit in Cambridge in August
Robert Watson
rwatson at FreeBSD.org
Mon Sep 22 10:37:55 BST 2008
On Mon, 22 Sep 2008, Sevan / Venture37 wrote:
> A couple of questions:
>
> The network stack virtualisation in 8.0 is that virtnet or something written
> from scratch??
This is based on Marko Zec's virtnet/vimage/immunes project. In about
2006(ish), the NLnet and the FreeBSD Foundation contracted Marko and UZagreb
to forward-port the work to FreeBSD 7.x from the original 4.x he did it on.
Due to some schedule slippage it's now in the process of entering the
8-CURRENT tree. There are a now a number of other contributors involved,
including Verio and Cisco. Verio is looking at open-sourcing their
FreeBSD-based managed server virtualization product, and merging those parts
into VImage as well.
The bits are flying right and left as the work takes place, so it's not really
ready for people to use or test yet, but I hope in the next couple of months
the prototype will finish entering 8.x and be ready for a larger audience.
We'll also see other subsystems fully virtualized, including some historically
defficient areas in Jail, such as System V IPC, POSIX IPC, etc, and a
much-improved management interface. Another planned feature is the ability to
specify which root kernel privileges are allowed in each Jail, something that
was done on an ad hoc basis for one or two privileges before, but now it will
be generalized.
The results are quite neat though -- you can create a series of jails, each
with their own firewalls, rate-limiting, VLANs, IPSEC, etc, each managed from
within the jail by the jail administrator.
Some notes from recent DevSummits:
http://people.freebsd.org/~bz/200805DevSummit/#vimageII
http://wiki.freebsd.org/Image/Notes200808DevSummit
And Marko's oldish page:
http://imunes.tel.fer.hr/virtnet/
> Xen DomU support, how far off are we from having a EC2 image for testing???
I don't have recent information, but I believe it is being actively worked on.
Apparently EC2 relies on a specific (and perhaps modified) version of the Xen
hypervisor interfaces:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/Xen
This is also definitely in the work-in-progress area, but lots of heavy
lifting going on.
Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
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