[Ukfreebsd] VIMAGE goodness

[Robert N. M. Watson]

On 6 Sep 2011, at 06:08, Simon Dick wrote:

> On 6 September 2011 00:00, Sevan / Venture37 <venture37 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 5 September 2011 15:12, Simon Dick <simond at irrelevant.org> wrote:
>>> On 1 September 2011 23:36, Sevan / Venture37 <venture37 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hiya,
>>>> Theres a new package which installs an rc script for managing VIMAGE
>>>> jails which'll save a load of scripting :)
>>>> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-virtualization/2011-September/000747.html
>>> 
>>> Now that's something I'll be looking into shortly :)
>> 
>> Ive still not had a chance to play with it myself, the ral(4) driver
>> had issues which is a bit of a showstopper for me.
> 
> We use jails at work, VIMAGE is something I keep meaning to play
> around with but never seem to get around to, this should give me the
> kickstart needed :)

In the interest of truth in advertising: VIMAGE remains an experimental feature, so caution should be exercised. That said, I know of at least one non-trivially sized ISP deploying it in production. I have Bjoern Zeeb, who has contributed significantly to the VIMAGE work, visiting the Computer Laboratory for the next week, speaking of which!

(Is anyone else on the list attending the European LLVM workshop in London on 16 September? I'll wander down to London for the day, as we'll have some posters about our ongoing work, including a temporal assertion system for FreeBSD ("TESLA") and our MIPS64 LLVM back-end work, required to an LLVM-based FreeBSD/MIPS64 working.)

Dr Robert N.M. Watson
University of Cambridge
Computer Laboratory