Difference in event channel implementation for Xen PV vs HVM guests

2013-03-18 Thread Roger Pau Monné
Hello,

While working on improving XENHVM (I've been looking at adding PV
timers), I've realized that the event channel implementation in PV vs
HVM mode differs greatly. Xen PV port uses sys/xen/evtchn/evtchn.c while
Xen HVM uses sys/dev/xenpci/evtchn.c, and the Xen HVM implementation is
greatly reduced (only contains the necessary functions to operate
backends/frontends).

To implement PV timers I need to expand the event channel interface for
XENHVM, and I was wondering why FreeBSD choose to have two different
implementations, the main difference between PV and HVM is the event
callback, but I guess this can be abstracted between the two different
implementations, and then everything else could be reused. Am I missing
something obvious?

Is there any known technical problem in modifying XENHVM to use the full
event channel implementation present in sys/xen/evtchn/evtchn.c that
prevented XENHVM from using it in the first place?

(Sorry if I've Cc'ed someone not related)

Thanks, Roger.
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Re: Difference in event channel implementation for Xen PV vs HVM guests

2013-03-18 Thread Justin T. Gibbs
On Mar 18, 2013, at 6:35 AM, Roger Pau Monné roger@citrix.com wrote:

 Hello,
 
 While working on improving XENHVM (I've been looking at adding PV
 timers), I've realized that the event channel implementation in PV vs
 HVM mode differs greatly. Xen PV port uses sys/xen/evtchn/evtchn.c while
 Xen HVM uses sys/dev/xenpci/evtchn.c, and the Xen HVM implementation is
 greatly reduced (only contains the necessary functions to operate
 backends/frontends).
 
 To implement PV timers I need to expand the event channel interface for
 XENHVM, and I was wondering why FreeBSD choose to have two different
 implementations, the main difference between PV and HVM is the event
 callback, but I guess this can be abstracted between the two different
 implementations, and then everything else could be reused. Am I missing
 something obvious?
 
 Is there any known technical problem in modifying XENHVM to use the full
 event channel implementation present in sys/xen/evtchn/evtchn.c that
 prevented XENHVM from using it in the first place?
 
 (Sorry if I've Cc'ed someone not related)
 
 Thanks, Roger.
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Hi Roger,

I know of no reasons why XENHVM cannot use the full event channel
interface.  In fact, Spectra Logic implemented PV timers and a
general cleanup of the HVM event channel interface.  I haven't merged
it back yet because I know the changes break PV and I haven't found
time to clean up the PV code, merge the HVM and PV event channel
systems, and move IPI/MSI delivery to event channels.

I've uploaded Spectra's changes here:

http://people.freebsd.org/~gibbs/xen_ev/

The diffs file provides the history of the original checkins to our
Perforce repository.  The tar file includes all the files that have
been modified and reflects our efforts to keep our code base in
sync with stable/9.  Apart from the PV issues outlined above, I
would expect the code provided to just drop right in to stable/9.

Unfortunately, Xen support is not a current priority for Spectra
so I don't have a lot of day job time to focus on getting this code back
into FreeBSD.  However, if this code looks like it would suite
your needs, and you have resources for testing i386/PV, I'd be happy
to collaborate with you and will make the time to help get this
committed.

--
Justin

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Re: bhyve: simplify memory assignment to VMs

2013-03-18 Thread Neel Natu
Hi,

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 11:08 AM, Neel Natu neeln...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hi,

 I am going to commit a change soon that simplifies how memory is
 assigned to a VM from a command line perspective.

 At the moment if you want to create a VM with say 8GB of memory you
 need to express this as -m 2048 -M 6144 or -m 1024 -M 7168 or some
 split that adds up to 8192MB. This is very flexible but is also very
 confusing to most users who don't know or care about the location of
 the PCI hole.

 I am going to change this so that the memory size is specified
 entirely with the -m memsize option and the -M option will
 disappear altogether.

 Of course, this means that scripts using -M will break and hence
 this heads up.

 I did consider making this a backward compatible change but given the
 stage of development of bhyve it seemed early to start accumulating
 compatibility crud.


Committed as r248477:
http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revisionrevision=248477

Please update your vmrun.sh scripts from /usr/share/examples/bhyve/vmrun.sh

best
Neel

 best
 Neel
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