Hi all:
Arm is releasing a new experimental CPU + SoC + board in early 2021, Morello,
based on our CHERI research at SRI International and the University of
Cambridge. At Cambridge, we’re looking to create a ‘Morello Cloud’ facility to
allow intra- and inter-institutional access to Morello virtual machines hosted
on a couple of racks of Morello boards, which would run CheriBSD (our
CHERI-extended version of FreeBSD). Cambridge's Research Computing Services
currently use OpenStack to host VMs on several HPC clusters out of our main
university datacenter, and it seems that we will ask them to host and manage
the Morello Cloud facility for us. We’ve identified and largely resolved on key
technical dependency, bhyve support for not just arm64, but also Morello, and
so that seems likely to be ready by our 2022 launch date.
Which then raises the question: What obstacles exist between us and having
FreeBSD host OpenStack compute VMs using bhyve on these boards? OpenStack has a
lot of moving parts, and casual googling has not made it immediately obvious to
me whether there is currently a community of FreeBSD OpenStack users using
FreeBSD for hosting, rather than just on VMs. I see lots of queries (and
information) on VM image creation, but all I’ve spotted really spotted on the
hosting topic was a 2014 presentation from Semihalf. However, their Nova GitHub
repository that appears untouched since roughly then:
https://github.com/Semihalf/openstack-nova
<https://github.com/Semihalf/openstack-nova>
I wonder if anyone on this list could point me at anything more recent, or if
there are folks actively working on this currently / have OpenStack deployed
with FreeBSD hosting + bhyve? We can put in some amount of engineering effort,
but right now we’re running a bit context free as to whether there’s existing
work in this space.
Thanks,
Robert
