FreeBSD on Xen (CentOS)

[deadeyes]

hi all,

recently I tried installing FreeBSD on Xen (The host distribution is CentOS/RedHat).

However, this failed... does anyone has FreeBSD (as DomU) working with Xen?

Eventually I installed it as a fully virtualized VM (i386).
amd64 also didn't work in fully virtualized mode.

Greetings!

PS: bsdforums.org rest in peace

[Carpetsmoker]

From http://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/Xen

One can either use the p4 //depot/projects/xen31 repository or the cvsup mirror on cvsup10.freebsd.org or cvsup18.freebsd.org. For the latter one just needs to change one's normal supfile from targeting src-all to targeting p4-cvs-xen31.

To help get one started a small file-backed disk and some sample configuration files can be found at:

http://www.fsmware.com/xenofreebsd/7.0/download/

[lvlamb]

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/virtualization.html

[phoenix]

If you have an AMD CPU with SVM extensions, then you can create a fully-virtualised HVM and install FreeBSD as per normal into it. I had 32-bit and 64-bit FreeBSD 6.3 and 7.0 (4 VMs) installed on a 64-bit version of Xen 3.2.0 on Debian for a while.

There are issues with doing the same on Intel CPUs with VMX. For some people it works, for others it doesn't.

Don't bother trying to get FreeBSD to run in a paravirtualised setup.

A much smoother, easier, more understandle method is to use [http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki KVM] with any distro that has a 2.6.24 kernel. We had a test setup with 2x 32-bit FreeBSD 6.3 doing buildworlds, 2x 64-bit FreeBSD 7.0 doing portsnaps, 64-bit Debian Etch doing dist-upgrade, and a 32-bit Windows XP doing a SP2 install, all simultaneously, without slowing any of them down noticeably. (2x dual-core Opteron 2 GHz, 8 GB RAM, 4 TB of disk in RAID6)