Virtualization TODO

This wiki page contains the results of brainstorming missing features required to make FreeBSD work well in a range of virtualized environments.

Cross-Platform

~~VirtIO drivers in the base tree (for KVM, bhyve, VirtualBox, possibly others)~~ (9/21, initial commit of virtio drivers to projects/virtio branch: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/svn-src-projects/2011-September/004361.html )
Support for hot adding/removing of CPUs (mainly for bare metal and VMware so far)
“make release” generates template disk / file system images (not specific to a particular VM platform)
“make release” extensions that allow qemu-tools (or similar external or new internal tools) to convert file system images into VM images that can be loaded with minimal work (i.e., VMDK, etc).
makefs(1) support for UFS2
GEOM “resize” event to allow device drivers to notify the storage stack of growth
Live-growable UFS
Shrinkable UFS (for reducing “cloud” costs)
Reorder partitions so that swap is first
Possibly a /boot with pivotroot twiddle model
tar(1) support for UFS1, UFS2
tar(1) support for ext2fs
Cross-install from Linux (i.e., FreeBSD installer ported to Linux can build FreeBSD file system images for use with a VM)

See: Xen
kldloadable PV drivers without having to compile in “options XENHVM”
Break out various Xen PV drivers into separate modules so they can be loaded independently – i.e., front drivers without back drivers
ifnet-level support for advertising the maximum number of mbuf clusters that can be used with TSO; Xen netfront tweaks to advertise the Linux limit used by netback
dom0 (but lots to do here – especially, grant tables, but also general stability work for “options XEN”)

See the dedicated bhyve page
Suspend/resume
Live migration
Support for older CPUs without nested paging virtualization (there are still a lot of them)

Make more filesystems jail friendly (audit individual filesystem code so that VFCF_JAIL can be set)

Add a FreeBSD VM vApp template. See /opt/vmware/etc/new_os/TODO_new_os in the VMWare Studio 2.6 image.

Port the Provisioning Agent to FreeBSD. This is just a shell script run once after first boot, which provisions a VM from template fillout hosted in a custom ISO image. /etc/rc integration is needed. See /opt/vmware/www/provagent/.build/etc/vmware-studio in the VMWare Studio 2.6 image.